Cycling in Waterloo Region

[Bytor]

I don’t think people realize how freakishly expensive road infrastructure is. The amounts we quibble over spending on paving bicycle routes are rounding errors in the discussion over widening roads and building expressways.

The current 401 widening project cost is $640M for 18 km. Some lanes already exist while others are new, and the logistics are a bit ugly. But it's somewhere on the order of $3M per lane-km. Or $36M for a km of 12-lane highway. Or $3000 per metre of driving lane.

$3M per lane⋅km is cheap—the North American average for highway-grade lanes is around $4M, from what I have read.