Highway 401 is the beast running through the heart of Ontario. It’s time to stop feeding the beast

The Ford government says it’s finished widening the 401 between Mississauga and Milton, but induced demand will soon clog those new lanes.

Thestar.com
Dec. 19, 2022
Shawn Micallef

Highway 401 is a beast that connects southern Ontario end-to-end. So wide, so fast, it’s a deadly and dangerous beast. Do a quick Google News search of it and words like “killed” “injured” “crash” and “wrong-way” come up over and over. Travelling it my entire life, I’ve had some frightening moments, and I bet everyone else has too. It scares me more as I get older, but it’s also a perversely fascinating piece of postwar megaproject engineering.

To pass the time on countless trips along it, mostly to Windsor, I’ve idly wondered how highway engineers weaved it through existing farmland, noted how many small concession roads were disconnected by it and where it altered the topography in major and minor ways.

Ontario has an amazing landscape, subtle by Canadian standards, but it’s varied and beautiful. Not much of it is really seen from the 401, though, a road designed to pass through it fast, annihilating the nuances of landscape for straight lines.

In his recent memoir “Son of Elsewhere,” author Elamin Abdelmahmoud writes that the 401 has been a constant for him, a kind of connective tissue of his life, and a looming presence for all of us. “A town of 150,000 people can pass by you in four exits, then it’s in your rear-view, and you’re returned back to the trees,” he writes. “It’s hard not to be romantic about this -- a perspective of human life that lets you swing out wide and see a whole city, and how fleeting it is.”

The 401 has never stopped growing since work on it began in the 1940s. Another word that comes up as often in a search is “construction.” So much so that it certainly was a relief to many when Minister of Transportation Caroline Mulroney announced this week that work had been completed on an 18-kilometre expansion of the highway between Milton and Mississauga that, in part, extended the express and collector system and added High Occupancy Vehicle lanes.

A project this size is many years in the making and dates back to the previous Liberal government, but governments of many stripes will take credit for and boast of highway expansion. It’s funny, though, when first encountering this construction years ago it felt like it just appeared out of nowhere, with little to no public or media attention given to this massive project, as if expanding space for cars is a natural phenomenon.

That is, compared to even the smallest changes in road allocation that gives more protected space to cyclists, pedestrians or transit. There are endless public and political debates, exhaustive fights and sky-is-falling proclamations for those. Next time somebody says something like the Yonge Street bike lanes are too much, too radical, nod over to the massive new 401 expansion. Or the next one. Or the one that will surely come after that.

As much as completion of this work is a relief for those who travel this busy stretch, the “busiest and most congested highway in North America,” according to Mulroney, it will only be temporary relief. The elephant in the room, or rather crossing the road, in any highway expansion is the concept of “induced demand.”

In layperson’s terms it means, “if you build it, they will come.” Case after case of highway expansion around the world demonstrates that soon after new lanes are added to superhighways, they routinely get clogged up to pre-expansion levels and make traffic worse as it encourages more drivers.

Traffic is a mysterious thing. Most people who are stuck in it have a hard time accepting they’re part of it. That’s one reason things like bike lanes get so much ire: they’re easy to blame, even if all those bike riders (or pedestrians, or transit riders) would cause havoc if they all decided to get into a car and drive.

As we watch this new stretch of the 401 fill with traffic in the near future, there are a few things to think about. The government boast of it being the “busiest and most congested” in North America is actually an admission of failure. So many trips along this stretch could and should be transit trips, but the adjacent GO Train lines that run to Milton and Kitchener have infrequent, terrible service.

All-day, two-way service, like on the Lakeshore routes, should be a higher priority than highway building is. Once there’s acceptable transit service, we can start to talk about road and congestion tolls to nudge people to the better option. Why shouldn’t the most expensive roads have some cost recovery, just as public transit is required to provide?

Speaking of highway building, the lesson of induced demand should be another reason to rethink highway 413 and the Bradford Bypass plans, apart from the environmental destruction and dubious developer connections involved. Why not expand transit? Even before it’s built, a Star and Narwhal investigation revealed this week that the Ontario government is considering doubling the size of the Bradford Bypass.

The 401 is mythic beast enough for Ontario, no need to feed other beasts.