Tunnels to nowhere
There are weeks when it seems there are no limits to the number of zany ideas people come up with, including (in no particular order), digging a tunnel under the 401 in Toronto to add lanes of traffic because there’s no way the existing 20 or so are enough, buying back the toll ring road Mike Harris — in all his customary lack of wisdom — sold to a private consortium and replacing one historic and majestic bridge with a Model T replacement that’s depressingly uninspiring, as I wrote in my Citizen column.
You can have a bridge in any colour as long as it’s white, and remember to be grateful for this mediocrity.
I spend enough time in, around and desperately trying to get through Toronto to be intimately familiar with just how gross the 401 can be, at all hours of day or night. In all the years I’ve been engaged in sports competition, both for karate and ultimate frisbee, I’ve had to grit my teeth and endure a journey through that mess to reach the promised lands of Brampton or Hamilton or London or Windsor/Detroit because apparently in this province we only compete west of Toronto. Oshawa would be so much simpler…
The distance between Ajax and Milton is 85 kilometres. It can take upwards of two hours to travel that, using the “express” lanes of the 401. Going from east of Toronto on the 401 to Mississauga using the Don Valley Parkway then the Gardiner can take half the day if you’re not careful. One memorable early Saturday morning it took well over an hour to go from the DVP to Canada’s Wonderland off the 400 in Vaughn with an terminally impatient Youngest who really didn’t find this piece of turgid urban design interesting.
All this to say I get it, alright? The 401 in the GTA is a mess. I have vivid memories of seeing my precious soul escape my corporeal envelope and going to die in diesel-infused bitumen dust. It freaking sucks to be stuck there.
So, take the 407, yeah? Sure, I’ll pay the toll to go around that fuckery. Coming back from Brampton on a Sunday night a few weeks ago I opted for it because the traffic maps showed an irredeemably clogged 401. Yes, all the lanes of the 401 were crawling at 6 pm on a summer Sunday. The 407 worked brilliantly. I paid $68.62 for the privilege.
One big problem we have in Ontario is that we are forcing people who simply want to get to the other side of any of our larger cities to go through instead of around. I’ve road-tripped a lot in North America since I was a toddler. Everywhere else there are (free) ring roads around cities because everyone sees the obvious advantage of not having transient traffic mix with the local kind. In Ontario, all we can think of is to add lanes in heavily populated areas. It’s like we’re compounding the stupid on purpose.
It’s not Ontario: Yours to Discover. More like Ontario: Normalizing the Dumb. We should try something better. Almost anything would do.
