Several proposed routes in northwest Vaughan considered for GTA west corridor
Proposed routes for GTA west corridor

YorkRegion.com
Dec. 3, 2014
Adam Martin-Robbins

Residents and landowners in northwest Vaughan will have to wait another year to find out the final proposed route for the 400-series highway slated to run through their backyard heading west to Halton Region.

That’s one of the messages Ministry of Transportation (MTO) officials delivered during a public information meeting at Chateau Le Jardin Conference Centre Tuesday.

The meeting was held, in part, to gather feedback on the proposed routes now under consideration for the GTA West Corridor, a 170-metre wide, four-to-six lane highway with a separate, adjacent transit way for buses.

The ministry has whittled down the number of potential routes through the environmental assessment process, which began in Nov. 2012 and is expected to take five years to complete.

At this stage, the portion of the highway running through Vaughan has been divided into three sections, each containing a number of alternative routes and potential interchanges.

The section from Hwy. 400 to just east of Pine Valley Drive, contains three potential routes all of which run between Kirby Road and King-Vaughan Road.

In the section from Pine Valley Drive to the Hwy. 27 area, there are essentially three routes that also run between Kirby Road and King-Vaughan Road.

But two of the routes in this section curve northward and merge as they head toward the boundary with King Township while the other route curves southward toward Kirby Road.

In the westerly section, from Hwy. 27 to Hwy. 50, the routes diverge most dramatically.

There are two southerly routes — both starting just north of Kirby Road — that follow a fairly straight path southwest toward the Nashville Road and Huntington Road area.

The other route begins in the north, at the King-Vaughan Rd., and crosses into King Township then arcs south toward Kirby Road before curving southwest to Hwy. 50.

All three routes are slated to connect to Hwy. 427, for which there are two potential extensions being proposed, one running close to Huntington Road and the other near Hwy. 50.

Ministry officials are gathering input on the proposed routes and hope to come up with a preferred route by this time next year.

The next step, from there, is the preliminary design of the highway, which is to be presented to the public in early 2017.

The ministry’s goal is to complete the entire environmental assessment process by 2018.

But there is no clear timeline, at this point, for the province to expropriate property and begin construction work as Queen’s Park hasn’t committed funding to those stages of the project, according to Natalie Rouskov, a senior project engineer with MTO.

If the highway does go ahead, it is projected to handle more than 300,000 vehicle trips per day by 2031 and is expected to relieve traffic pressure on local roads.

Despite that, the project isn’t sitting well with some local residents.

Kleinburg resident Roger Dickinson believes the highway is inevitable and he’s concerned about the potential harm building such a massive roadway might cause, especially to the rivers and wetlands it will cross.

“If you’ve got 170 metres, that’s colossal,” he said. “The potential for damage is just colossal to the environment. I guess they’re doing their best to mitigate that, but it’s still going to be a huge impact to whatever they cross. So when we get to that detail, we have to pay much more attention and look for opportunities to mitigate it.”

Dickinson said he’s been pressing ministry officials to ensure that they preserve as many trees as possible.

“(I told them) we can’t afford to have construction crews just clear-cut because that’s the way they like to do things,” he said. “If we can leave a couple of 50-year-old trees in the middle of a cloverleaf of an intersection then we should leave them because you can plant another tree, but you never recover the 50 years when you chop the old one down. And they agreed”

Woodbridge resident Guido Masutti thinks the highway is a waste of taxpayers’ money and will do little to address traffic congestion.

“They should be (planning) places where you work, places where you live and places where you grow your food. That’s sustainable planning, not building highways,” he said. “Look what Honda did for Alliston. Now they’re building houses there and people are working there. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. ... The people from Barrie they spend three hours in the morning coming down to work and three hours at night going home. That’s ridiculous. Why didn’t they bring a few factories up to Barrie when they built the houses? Then people could travel five or 10 kilometres to get to work.”