Toronto's Highway 401. Ontario, Canada ๐จ๐ฆ
I feel sorry for them. But then again, this is what they want.
-
They oppose making parking expensive.
-
They oppose bus lanes
-
They oppose bike lanes.
-
They oppose trains
-
They oppose train stations.
-
They oppose congestion pricing.
They oppose any measure that might reduce car dependency.
674
Comments119
More lanes wil definitely fix this issue
Just one more lane....
Doug Ford wants to build a tunnel under it to add more lanes.
Yes, he's as stupid as he sounds.
No he doesn't he just wants a convenient way to funnel money to people paid to 'study' this boondoggle.
Bro thats the narrow stretch.
Worth calling out who "they" are, cause I know a LOT of people who don't want this.
The federal government certainly doesn't seem like they're doing much to reduce car dependency right now with the motion to fast track oil and gas pipelines. (Worth editing in this part for those in the UK: Yes, the current government is led by the same Carney you might know.)
The provincial government, where this highway is situated, proposed adding a tunnel, yes you read that right, A FUCKING TUNNEL!, underneath this highway TO ALLOW MORE CARS ON THE ROAD.
The Toronto City Council (which, to be fair, has less sway here) is filled with car-brained nutjobs from the suburbs who oppose every measure that they perceive makes it harder for them to get into the city.
Obligatory Fuck Doug Ford
Fuck Doug Ford indeed.
The tunnel was a stupid idea from a high school dropout. GTA needs to upgrade the GO trains, but none of the Vaughan Canadesi get rich off that.
As far as I know, that tunnel is still happening. Till DoFo gets turfed anyway. I hope.
The tunnel is impossible. Ford is wasting $50M in studies.
Not to worry, he'll also waste $5B in construction. And then he'll sell it to a foreign multinational.
It's only 16 lanes. Have they try 32 lanes?
They want to build a tunnel underneath it to add more lanes, so unironically yes.
underground trafficjam, mmmmmmmm
The key feature is, this /c wonโt be able to post overhead pictures of the underground traffic.
It's around 18 or 19 at its widest so it isn't like they aren't trying.
This topic just reminded me of AI. We are told we just need to build more capacity and AI will get better and more reliable. Just one more lane(data centre) and weโll solve all the issues.
No, it's what the GTA suburban people want. I live in Ottawa but travel to Toronto quite often and the actual city doesn't want any of that shit but our province is run by a petty mob boss
You can thank my fellow Ontarians for being fucking morons and electing Doug Ford who rewards his contractor buddies with expensive projects like making another layer of highway instead of improving our ailing railway infrastructure.
Doug Ford wants to double it by digging a tunnel underneath the 401. Not for electric trains. But more cars. Because I really want to drive in darkened smoggy tunnels.
I can't wait for the entire tunnel to be closed by an accident. If you thought being stuck on the 401 was bad enough when there's an accident, now try having absolutely nothing to look at while you do so! And if something catches fire, it'll be far worse than above ground.
Tunnel ventilation is a solved problem. I'd actually prefer if all city highways were underground.
Ok. You got me there. In a perfect world, fast subterranean mechanized electric transport would be ideal, freeing the surface for more parks, forests and bikepaths.
Edit: that is not what Douggie is planning.
Nothing like getting stuck in traffic underground
Another lane, maybe?
According to Doug Ford, a huge ass tunnel.
He is, without a doubt, a fucking moron.
But somehow, Ontarians still vote for him.
*A tunnel that will be built by one of his friends.
Because he's managed to convince the bare minimum amount of idiots that all the things under his control was all Trudeau's fault.
Ah darn. I lack the vision. Why another lane, if you can do another tunnel. Like a fucking wormhole connecting the ends.
Yeah, there's so much unused space in this picture: houses, trees, ... Those could all be roads. Really this picture just shows how the woke "not everything is a road" policy has failed regular, everyday drivers.
Hereโs an idea: If we have people live in their cars, we can eliminate housing and parkland and successfully turn all land into highways!
There is a french graphic novel from 1974 where the story is exactly that: people spend so much of their live in the car that the government device to just transform the whole country into a giant highway with oriole living in self driving car constantly moving.
There is a reddit post with the whole album there : https://www.reddit.com/r/Giscardpunk/comments/11e2kme/les_mangebitume_jacques_lob_et_jos%C3%A9_bielsa_1974/
Goodness. Fucking. Gracious.
Makes perfect sense.
You're hired!
-Automobile junkies.
Metro Toronto is a disappointment. It should be have been doubling its subway network every 20 years. Instead it shut down a line, added a few stations on another, and built LRT that's slower than the bus it replaced.
It needs express subway tracks, GO with 10 minutes headways, and transit oriented development able to house 10k people within a ten minute walk of every GO stop which means zoning for density,
Pay for it by owning the land around stations like HK or Singapore and leasing it to developers for 40 story affordable apartments, increasing the gasoline tax, and putting tolls on the 401 and Gardiner.
Toronto is a transportation nightmare. It's time to adopt successful models from Asia to make transit fast, convenient, and cheap while making driving fast, convenient, and incredibly expensive. Fill in with protected bike lanes and the city will be liveable and affordable with great air quality
Toronto is one Ford family grift piled on top of another. All city planning is based on favours owed to their buddies or to keep their degenerate relatives afloat.
The Ford brothers have been a disaster for Toronto. Starting with cancelling Transit City, demolishing the waterfront, encouraging sprawl with no transit option in the Greenbelt. Doug Ford should be in jail. Everyone intelligent said that developers are sitting on 10's of thousands of approved building sites, and colluding with each other about how many homes get built a year. Now, even though Ford has demolished most of the environmental laws, developers aren't rushing to build. The developers always had their own schedule. They're now building fewer homes a year, than when Ford was elected.
The underground portion of the Eglinton LRT could have been great. Each station having a residential 30 story tower above it, and lots of retail underground to lease out. Instead each station is larger than a palace, seems empty, and has no retail.
No one is pointing out the other side of this that gets neglected and that is โthe demand to live just outside the core but commute to the core dailyโ.
That just does not work, full stop. There was a time that it seemed to work but we already reached the capacity.
Even if we have great transportation, having people move so much on a daily basis is a bad idea.
We really need to move away from the one big city mindset, but itโs not easy to do
Work from home should be encouraged. It helped a little during the pandemic, places outside of Toronto saw an influx of people; Orilla, Peterborough, Owen Sound. But Ford ordered all the employees back to the office, and now that model is suffering.
one big city is fine as long as you don't want to have city where you work separate from the suburbs where you live. this is one completely artificially created expectation that only exist in america due to a century of car lobby and propaganda. if your work, doctor, pub, park and shop are all within 5-15min walk from your home and you can get everywhere else by public transport it's ok if the city stretches wide and it is actually quite pleasant to live in (ymmv).
Yeah, it worked when people were okay with riding bicycles.
It works if you just have railways, the finger model is extremely good.
(Finger model means cities like Copenhagen and Stockholm, where you have "fingers" of development stretching away from the "palm" in the middle, with each finger being built around a railway)
Just one more lane bro
just one more lane bro. i promise bro just one more lane and it'll fix everything bro. bro... just one more lane. please just one more. one more lane and we can fix this whole problem bro. bro c'mon just give me one more lane i promise bro. bro bro please i just need one more lane
401 is a disaster but I disagree with some of your points. Parking is expensive as fuck, especially downtown. Trains are available, they are actively building a new LRT system. The city is dense as fuck so where would you propose putting more stations?
They've literally been building new subway lines
30 years too late.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.
The second best time is now.
Try planting a tree in a paved over parking lot.
The comments on this thread are exactly why transit expansion has been "planning" for 50 years in Toronto. Every year they fuck around with NIMBYS the cost and time increases.
Ford keeps calling for building more subways, but never really does.
The Eglinton W. LRT extension tunnel is a waste of billions of dollars. Eglinton is so wide near Royal York, it could have easily been built above ground, and should have been complete by now. But Ford loves to waste money. The Ontario Line was more or less approved before Ford even took office.
We need a subway up Bathurst, from the Lake all the way up to almost Newmarket. We need a subway under Lawrence from the Airport to Oshawa. We need a subway under Dundas. We need to extend the Sheppard line all the way across the city, into Ajax.
If only you had a time machine.
Lrt is kinda hot garbage though and had eglington area shutdown for like 15 years to build a system that's slower than a bus and added insane complexity to every traffic light sequence at each intersection
For the above ground portion anyway. They are fucking morons for not making it above the road, seperate from traffic and intersections... its just a longer slower bus that needed all that extra infrastructure built just to follow the existing road
Parking is super expensive. Even employees at Sunnybrook hospital pay exorbitant rates
Really wish they would add more subway, fully underground only (or above road!), fuck congesting roads further, look at the extension through YorkU into Vaughan, 50 mins from Union to YorkU? That is a thing of beauty
Are they talking about the LRT that someone beat from one end to the other by racing on foot? Yeah... that's totally a great LRT!!!!
Trains are technically available in Canada, but let's be honest, they aren't reliable, have bad schedules, are unnecessarily complex in certain cases (I have seen that they weigh your luggage like you are boarding an airplane...) and just are not a good service in general.
Toronto has promise from what I can tell because they are trying to build a new metro line, but it has been delayed many a time sadly (common trend) and has ballooned in cost. Just gotta hope.
Vancouver skytrains are great. Autonomous elevated metro, every 3-5 minutes in some cases.
There's a new line going in to extend even further outside current metro boundaries.
Ironically the Scarborough RT, that is now shut, was exactly the same technology as the train in Vancouver. Except Vancouver paid the have it upgraded, and Toronto shut it down to build a subway extension on orders of Ford. An extension that will take a least another decade, that follows the same route as the Scarborough RT that was already running.
I don't understand why he gets voted back in, he actively works against progress and good things.
He only got 43% of the popular vote. The ridings are too big, at 100,000 people per riding. The ridings should be 30,000 people. That way more people would be engaged, you'd get a few more regional parties that represent their specific interests. I can see a rural party starting in the NW of Ontario, that actual represents them.
I don't understand how the Conservatives hold together. The rural voters should be pissed about the billions he is unnecessarily wasting in Toronto with having the Eglinton LRT West buried for no reason, the billions for gutting Ontario Place, cancelling the Beer Store contract 1 year early, etc...
I think Calgary and Vancouver have decent trains to be honest. Montreal seemed good when I was there too.
The LRT is not the Eglington cross town. They are 2 separate projects.
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT is literally its Fing name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_5_Eglinton https://www.metrolinx.com/en/projects-and-programs/eglinton-crosstown-west-extension
The fucking Finch west LRT was the one in the motherfucking news. The cocksucking Eglington cross town isn't even finished yet for fuck sakes. The Finch LRT is slow as shit and the one that previous asshole thought he was talking about. Nice chatting with you, dickhead.
This thread began by talking about Eglinton, get with it.
The Eglington one has been deemed much better, so far, than the Finch one. The Eglington one isn't even finished yet and it doesn't suck as much as the LRT did on day one. I always hear Eglington called "crosstown" and the Finch one is always called the LRT. Keep with the nomenclature.
These are the dumb compromises that the left needs to make with right wingers like Ford to get things like the LRT build. The left governments propose a proper LRT built like they are in Europe. Ford and his followers scream about giving cars priority to turn left and right in-front of the trains. Ford, and his friends, demands that all the good plans be changed to ones that priorities cars driving by the LRT, to get approval. And we end up with a dumpster fire of a slow LRT, slow Spadina streetcar, slow King streetcar.
It'll only be when Ford is gone that we can really start to do changes.
Regardless, more subways won't fix the problem of people living in Whitby and working in Mississauga, or buying a house in Barrie and working in Toronto.
Fucking Ontario can't do simple math. These morons are working for their commutes.
The GO train system is shit on the west side. They don't have dedicated rail lines after Peel Region and run very infrequently.
That must be so fucking loud to be near
Oh it is, and there's "luxury" condos right beside it selling for stupid high prices
Breathing in all those truck fumes. What a failed city.
If I'm right about where this is, it's also right by Pearson Airport, and is the busiest stretch of road in North America by average daily traffic.
Who is "they"? Traffic reducing measures are generally popular with people living in cities, but stopped by suburban NIMBYs who commute. Just because someone is driving a car doesn't automatically make them part of the problem.
Doug Ford and the PCs.
What a horrible highway to drive through. The very few times I've been to Toronto, I have dreaded driving through this. It's ridiculous.
It should be reduced to 80km/h through Toronto, to prevent accidents and make it more of a predicable and steady ride. It's not just congestion, it's everyone cutting each other off that makes this drive so bad. There should be speed cameras every kilometer to make sure everyone obeys the speed limit. Dropping from 100km/h to 80km/h through Toronto isn't going to lose anybody any time, it's backed up half the time anyway, and it'll make it safer at night.
I agree, So many people were straight up racing across traffic. Zig-zagging everywhere. And who the fuck passes from the right???? I nearly had a deadly collision with some lady driving a huge pickup truck that decided to pass a van from the right. And when I tried to merge in front of the van, she came in from the right lane at full speed without even looking. Absolutely insane!
Drivers in Toronto are fucking bonkers. Some of the worst I've ever encountered. And I've driven in several countries across the globe.
In Toronto's defence though, the city did improve its roads in general with added bike lanes. I went last year and it was my first time since 2011 I think. The lanes are smaller and traffic slowed down, but it's not frustrating.
In Montreal, they're re-doing a section of Hochelaga in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood with added bike lanes on each side. Traffic already slowed down, it's less noisy, there's less pollution. And I get to feel a lot safer on that street on my bicycle now.
Funnily enough lower speeds also makes the road fit more cars, so it might actually help congestion slightly.
Take 1 lane away, and put a subway down the middle of that bad boy.
Absolutely not. Motorway median metros are the worst kind. Build transit in better places, and remove highway lanes own its on merits.
Induced demand is a real thing. You can disinduce demand just the same. Remove lanes to decease traffic.
Every one of those transport trucks could be consolidated into one freight train...
But also, fuck the cars
Doesn't make a lot of sense to have freight trains running through a city. Best to have a few freight train stations on the edge and light/medium duty trucks for last mile.
401 Unauthorized
When did we, as a people, decide that this is development?
Yeah these stupid anti car people donโt get it. We just need an extra lane! Get rid of train tracks and bike lanes to free up more space!
Maybe instead of cars everyone can have motorhomes. Then we wonโt have houses or neighbourhoods getting in the way of us building more lanes!!
/s just in case
One more lane will fix that. /s just in case.
We've sure let a lot get out of hand in the pursuit of the american dream here in Canada.
You didn't mention toll booths to pay for the maintenance. Those can still be added.
With surveilance automobiles, you just pay the demand based surge pricing or your car drives itself off the highway.
Regarding all the "they" in the description: there's a huge difference in attitudes between people in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and Trontonians proper...
Y'all tryna be America or something?
The 401 pre-dates the Interstate system.
America wanted to be like us.
Fuck Ford for trying to rip out already built bike lanes.
Not sure what the latest is on that but I know the people sued and at least delayed it.
Latest was that Ontario appealed the decision which stopped the government from arbitrarily removing them.
AFAIK we're waiting on the appeals court decision.
Ontario Slow Way
this is the first thing I have seen from toronto that makes me not want to live there (but I do because all the other stuff)
The thing you have to understand is that unlike American major cities Toronto actually has not a ton of smaller freeways.
The other thing to understand is that the 401 is not just traffic in Toronto, it's also the major connecting highway for about 50 percent of the province. So it's not just local traffic. Anyone trying to get to places opposite Toronto have to take this highway.
The province built a new Highway called 407 in order to help traffic bypass the city. Then the provincial conservative government sold it for a song so they could say they balanced the books for 1 year. It's now the most expensive toll route in the world.
Shit fucking sucks.
actually very reminiscent of things from my city.
Having visited Toronto recently... this is average, even at night. It's hellish.
I'm not Canadian or Torontonian (is that the right word?) so I... fail to see why there's so many cars on both sides of this highway. Where are they going for this fucked congestion to occur in the first place?
Usually it's just people commuting to and from work. A large portion of workers in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) work in Toronto proper, and since Toronto, like essentially every North American urban centre, is so obnoxiously car-dependent they all have to drive in from every direction. It's like if a five year-old made a town in SimCity.
I read elsewhere here that this Ford guy also ordered a return to the office, and wants to build an underground tunnel below this road. Yep, it's gonna work out. He's deliberately making this thing worse. He could've solved this if he didn't have that kind of pro-employer agenda, damn.
If only traffic was that light.
Okay but there are a lot of tricks and those carry the goods you use every day. Yes, freight trains exist but you still need trucks to get them to the last mile. Roads are still the best for moving the kind of merchandise the western world consumes.
The cars should not really be with the trucks, the trucks should stick to a couple lanes.
So, you're saying the entire system is fucked? I agree.
Oh, absolutely.
If all the cars were removed from the photo, the trucks would be moving at highway speed.
I think that all new subway stations should have a post office attached to it, and one end of the line terminating at the airport. Load up packages, get them to the correct subway station by train, and people and walk to pick up their mail/delivery.
I see the problem right away, too many trucks! Theyโre everywhere!
Okay but why are all of the cars black and white other than like 3 trucks?
colors don't sell as well, so they're all basic boring af colors these days.
The colors are less vibrant for sure and a lot of people just stick with black white or grey, but other colors are still a lot more common than what I'm seeing in the picture.
Colored paint doesn't last as well as white/silver/black
Reds seem particularly bad. But our bright blue Toyota still looks like it came out of the show room and its 22 years old.
Been there, done that.
Its going to take decades, but im excited for that high speed rail project.
The coming economic collapse and social decline will take care of it. This is how we have always arranged our affairs.