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It’s as if by making it easier for people to drive instead of having viable alternatives, people would chose to drive more, causing even more cars to fill up the 401.
Induced demand is a terrifying demon that will make driving more miserable by taking away resources from solutions that actually work: trains and other alternative measures. A single train can move as many people as the entire 134km of new roads, and you can put more than one train on a single new rail track. You can run dozens of such trains a day, and instead of being a money sink hole, it can even operate at a profit that goes directly towards maintaining the remaining roads as long as it’s government owned rather than have private middlemen pocket the surplus cash.
Toronto and many other major cities already have wonderful and expansive rail infrastrucutre. We just need to upgrade the rail systems in between cities so that passenger and freight doesn’t have to compete for the same lines causing massive delays every single day.
Lesson for all car nuts - more lanes does nothing. Only mass transit and trains (for cargo) get enough cars and trucks off the road that the remaining vehicles can actually go the speed limit.
“Ontario added 134 km of lanes to Highway 401. Its key bottleneck didn’t get better”
Article: They didn’t add any lanes in Toronto, just to outlying areas where they claim traffic was improved. Toronto traffic still miserable after nothing was done there.
Seriously, if this is costing us 11 billion a day in economic damage, get more people working from home. The solution is so blindingly obvious. It saves money and can be done overnight. Fuck, we are a stupid bunch of apes.
Seriously, if this is costing us 11 billion a day in economic damage, get more people working from home.
So much this. I’m not in Ontario, my commute in Saskatoon is an obscene 15 minutes, so I don’t go into work all the time. People have asked why I never took any tech jobs in Toronto or KW, and there are two major reasons: 1. Too people-y. I am a small town person, and 2. TRAFFIC HOLY FUCK WHO CAN SIT IN A CAR THAT LONG IN THE CITY?!!? I won’t move to Calgary, Edmonton, or even Winnipeg for the same reason and they’re not nearly as bad.
Wouldn’t decentralizing to the point that traffic is relieved also have the effect of massively devaluing the astronomically expensive real estate at the Centre of the Universe? Owned by the most powerful entities in the country…
I’m failing to see the downside.
The downside is the impracticality. The people who stand to lose from property devaluation are the same people who decide policy. How are you going to convince them to give up their property values for the benefit of their commuting workers??
Was it because of the bike lanes? /s 🤡
A classic engineering blunder, they should have added one more lane. 99% of traffic engineers quit adding lanes right before the finally fix traffic.
“just 1 more lane bro, I promise it’ll fix traffic”
Well, eventually it would—when they reach a number of lanes equal to the total population of the metropolitan area, plus one, so that all residents can be on the road at the same time, driving abreast. Of course, the last few lanes will have to be built on top of James Bay, but you can’t have everything.
It evens out. We just have to cut all social services and healthcare in order to afford maintaining the roads. Many will die as a result but that’s just less lanes to maintain. It’s brilliant.
More roads equal easier commute which means more people buy cars and move out of the city. They should be focusing on lowering housing costs in the city and investing in public transit.
It’s Toronto, how many people didn’t already have cars? It’s not exactly London or New York City.
I’m in BC. We have a car, but traffic into Vancouver is heavy in the morning so I take the Bus connector and Skytrsin. I get to work almost in same amount of time. More transit with better schedules reduces traffic much faster than adding lanes.
I’d love an east-west Go train line that follows the 401 from the Rouge National Park in scarbs to Mississauga.
And it needs to go all the way. None of this turning trains around in the middle, making it insanely slow to go anywhere but the middle.
Lakeshore east west. 30 minute all day & week service. A little more south but it works good.
It’s clearly not enough. It only serves the commuters downtown. Everyone were talking about is stuck on the 401. Maybr building commuter dail on the 401 would help address that.
It has 30 min all day all way service from 5am to 12am. I think its fine (I wish better frequency)
From my experience, the teouvle is getting around within the city using their busses, which is why ppl opt for cars.
Imagine if they’d added simple commuter rail instead of lanes along the highway. It’s so blindingly obvious.
Invest in developing places that aren’t the big magnet city. Invest in telecommunications so that Letterkenny can run a data centre and/or call centre.
Invest in mass transit solutions. Use some of those powers that let Ford override the Conservation Authorities to override freight railways.
ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO WORK FROM HOME!
It’s not people who need encouragement to do so, it’s employers. COVID proved how unnecessary most office work actually is, and now they’re clawing that back for imaginary made-up reasons. Stop them, we have labor standards regulation for a reason, and they can’t gaslight us anymore by pretending there’s no other way for them to function.
And for the few companies that actually do need large numbers of in-office workers, start programs to incentivize them to move to smaller communities to become THE major employer for that area or better yet diversify and spread out their workforce and offices into multiple towns instead of centralizing all office jobs in the densest part of a handful of cities, the small “efficiency” gained for the company is not worth the added social and infrastructure costs which are borne largely by taxpayers. They don’t even have to move far. Montreal and Toronto are surrounded by dozens of built-up communities with relatively good infrastructure. They just need commitment from employers to move there. Vancouver’s geography is a bit more challenging but there is still plenty of room for improvement.
I don’t think Mark “Brookfield” Carney is going to save us on this issue, so I imagine it will have to be dealt with by the provinces or put on the backburner for some future federal government to deal with, but my god it is stupid that we let corporations organize themselves this way.
I’m shocked I tell you, shocked! Well, actually not that shocked.
