General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

I can’t help but pile on one extra criticism of this woefully stupid idea. Toronto is famously ill-prepared for flooding events, so wouldn’t a massive tunnel just fill with water during every rain event? Also, couldn’t they just spend this money on flood-resilience measures for other highways that get snarled during floods (403, DVP)?

Back to reality, my hope is that they actually know this is a horrible idea, but they want traffic studies to point to for justifying other ideas. Like, “it’s cheaper to buy back the 407 instead of my great tunnel idea, so we’re going to go ahead and do that instead.”

This is an interesting theory. FWIW...it's hard to tell with DoFo as I do think he is rather stupid.

That being said, people in general do tend to have zero understanding of the cost of these things. More people than you think might be stupid about this. Of course, they're also just generally stupid about it. Most don't think deeply enough about anything to realize that tunnelling to carry two train tracks for transit would 1/10, 1/50th? The cost of tunnelling a tunnel big enough to carry another 10 lanes of 401 traffic. Like, saying it's stupid is mean, and unproductive, but I don't really have a better word for it. I'm not saying they couldn't understand this if they tried, I'm saying they aren't bothering to even think about it.