401 Tunnel

Episode: 0277
Why the Proposed 401 Tunnel is a Misguided Solution to Toronto's Traffic Woes

​As Toronto grapples with ever-increasing traffic congestion, the province of Ontario is considering a drastic solution: burying a tunnel beneath the 401 highway. However, this approach raises more questions than answers and may not be the panacea that officials hope for. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the complexities surrounding this proposed project and explore more effective alternatives.

​        Tunnel, really? That's what it's come down to? The Province of Ontario is now looking at burying a tunnel underneath the 401 to try and alleviate traffic through Toronto. Meanwhile, they've had tons of other great ideas to alleviate traffic over the years. And yet all these tree hugging people have pushed them down and said, we're destroying our urban area. Literally, that's what they sound like. So now our province wants to use all of our money from the rest of the province and pilot into a 50-kilometer stretch of the 401 in Toronto only to build a tunnel to somewhat alleviate traffic. Yeah, bullshit on that. Okay. This isn’t going to alleviate nothing unless you build it twice the size of the 401 today. Cause really all you're doing is just digging hopes and dreams that are getting backfilled behind you. So today, AutoLooks is going to take a look at the 401-tunnel idea.
 
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​        So, like I said, the 401-tunnel idea is stupid if Doug Ford to think that this is going to work. Bury a tunnel underneath the busiest fucking highway in the country and one of the busiest in North America. Did he not see how much it cost and how much it fucked up the city of Boston when they did their big dig. The project was over twice the original price tag took years longer to build, caused so many headaches and literally put the city of Boston at a standstill for any type of expansion or major projects for well over a decade seriously you're going to think of doing this. I get it we put subway tunnels in and they disrupt roads but they disrupt city traffic roads where there's a million other roads to bypass it for short amount of times. And hell they don't usually mess up everything.  But building a limited access road underneath a major cities and one of the busiest Highways in North America, and you think this is a good idea.
 
       This highway connects to a multitude of others. The 50 kilometer stretch they're thinking of essentially goes from Milton almost all the way to Oshawa. So, you get the 410, the 407, the 403, 427 and the original the 400. Oh yeah. And the 404 is in there as well, which is the 404 Don Valley Parkway. All of these different highways, this thing has to connect to underneath an existing highway, which was built in the 1950's was built to that code and has never really been updated past that code. 

​        So right about now, you're probably asking yourself, Everett, how do you know about building a tunnel? Have you ever built a tunnel? Have you ever been involved with a project building a tunnel? The answer to that is no. I have to say that out loud. No, I have never built a tunnel. I've never been part of a construction project to build a tunnel, but I have been a project manager for a construction company on some fairly large projects plus working as an estimator on the other side of the construction project, seeing how much it costs for labor, material, tools, anything else that goes into developing big projects. So yeah, I have a little bit of knowledge behind me to understand the complex construction of a tunnel going underneath the 401. And the reason why I say it's going to take at least 20 years; a subway tunnels are not easy to build. And I've seen some of these subway tunnels and I've gotten the construction projects.
 
       Seeing the layouts and all that from a few of them that have it in Toronto from some contractors I work with and just seeing them and what's involved and just pricing out like one or two things I was able to include in it and seeing the price of them, it's just astronomical. And then what goes in to building these things, seeing those giant boring machines dig through all of this shit and to dig underneath a pre-existing highway that literally has no end to traffic ever throughout the day, hell, throughout the year. It's constantly busy. And unless you're going to work for a two-hour period in the middle of the night, you're never going to get this project through. And on top of that, you got to deal with pipes, rivers, bridges, subway systems, electrical lines, and then the pre-existing structure that's above you need to reinforce the structure that's above you.
 
      And knowing what the city of Toronto is going through right now to redo to the Gardner Expressway, literally an elevated highway just doing reconstruction on it. The original timeframe was five years. They've managed to bring that down to between two to three years by putting more people onto it to try and move along a lot quicker. There's a lot of work just to go into repair of an existing elevated highway. Now something underground. You have to talk about putting vent shafts in, putting escape hatches in.
 
      Like people have to be able to get out of it in case of an emergency. Then you got all these brand-new systems you have to put in place. Fire suppression systems, you have to get smog and pollution out. If there's a battery vehicle that goes up, you have to make sure that the tunnel is not going to collapse under the immense heat from an electric vehicle burning in that tunnel. These are all things you have to consider when putting this and it's going to be underneath a pre-existing highway. Seriously, it's just wrong. 

​        One of the biggest problems I have with this idea is what is going to constitute as an actual connection for the highway. Is this highway only going to connect to other feeder highways that break off of it? So, going from the end of Milton all the way out to Oshawa, the 50 kilometer stretch that they want to do, is how is it going to be breaking off for the 404, DVP, the 400, the Allan Expressway?
 
         The 427, the 403 and 410, and hell, even the 407, 413. Are these going to be the only areas that they're going to have to build underground bridges? On top of that, these bridges, these tunnels are going to have to go either over top or underneath the tunnel they want to build just to get people out without having to put traffic lights or anything in. See, even that, you got to build a cloverleaf underneath a cloverleaf underground. The engineering feat that would go into doing that is mind boggling especially for a city that has land available to build on. We get it, Southern Ontario is one of the most prime agricultural areas of all of the country of Canada. Well, its the, prime area and it's the one area that we're developing on top of all this farmland and destroying it. We're taking food away from ourselves. Kind of stupid, don't you think?
 
        But if you're put a new highway in, you have to do it somewhere. Like I said, building this underneath the old Spadina Expressway, yes, we'd still have those issues, but you would be building underneath buildings that pre-exist as opposed to a functioning roadway. To build any extension or addition or upgrade to a highway that already exists is a greater feat than putting a brand new one in in an area that one doesn't exist. Because you have to keep the flow of traffic on the pre-existing roadway while you're building underneath of it.
 
      Like I said in the intro, go back and look at the big dig and how long and expensive it was just to do that in the city of Boston. Yeah, they got some great park space above the ground now. But Toronto is just going to have a two-tiered highway instead of building an elevated highway above the highway that's already there, they're going to drop it underneath. Like the number of things, you're going to go through. And even in the country of Canada, you could still run into artifacts.  Run into an area that once was a building or a native settlement, and then BAM, the whole project comes to a standstill. So really, these are questions you need to ask as well. It's going to disrupt whatever it's going underneath it for a long period of time. And you need to build entrances and exits. You need to build safety. You need to build a tolerance for heat, for cold, everything else including the country of Canada, salt, because people coming from the surface underneath, they're to be bringing salt and sand on their vehicles into this area so you're to have to wash it. Think about all of this before you even consider building this fucking tunnel. 

​         Seriously, has Doug Ford ever sat down and put a list together of the pros and cons of actually doing this? Or has he just said, there's too much traffic, let's dig under it. We could do that. Hell, they blast to Northern Ontario. They got tons of mines underground. Yeah, built into massive rock, which barely moves and its long-distance underneath anything above it to take that into consideration as well. Say the reason why this is one of the dumbest ideas you can ever think of for the province of Ontario is the fact that the province of Ontario has a 50-year deficit on major infrastructure improvements. There's a lack of major public infrastructure in the city of Toronto just to begin with for public use. We're talking light rail systems, subways, streetcars, buses, hell, even cabs. And some instances, they don't have dedicated bus routes. The city of Ottawa has dedicated bus routes. It has a light rail system. Montreal just built a massive light rail system. Montreal also has double the number of subways as the city of Toronto and the city of Toronto is almost three times the size of Montreal is now. So, where's your public transit system?
 
        They want to bury this highway without investing tons more into public transit. The GO train now goes all the way up to bury to try and alleviate people on the 400 and the 404. That's good, but it still only goes to select locations and it barely even connects with subway stations. Adding two more subway lines could help alleviate some of that traffic for just standard cross traffic and automobiles. For transportation traffic, we talked about this one on a past podcast, dedicated transport routes.
 
       Keep the tolls on the 407 and make it free for transports. There you go. Most of the 407 goes through industrial parks anyways. Just allow all the truckers to drive on it for free. Keep the fucking people in the cars off of it. Now they want to build the 413 just above it as well. But the 413 only going down from the edge of Milton where the 401-407 meet, to the 400. It doesn't even cross over to go to the 404.
 
     The 427 has never been expanded. The 410 hasn’t been expanded. Conestoga Parkway hasn't expanded. 17 hasn't been expanded. 11 hasn't been expanded properly. 69 isn't finished. There are tons and tons of more projects. Two things the city of Toronto could do to alleviate traffic right now and I hope Doug Ford's listening to this because I'm literally going to try and forward this to his office and tag him so that he fucking listens to my podcast for once and gets this through his little Toronto mindset fucking skull.
 
        Okay. Two things the city of Toronto needs. One, stop being a hog. We get it. You're called hog town because Toronto was originally the place that you brought all of the hogs in Southern Ontario to get slaughtered. Okay. It was a main slaughterhouse for pigs in the province of Ontario for the longest time. Hence hog town. Now it's called hog town because Toronto gets everything. Everything goes to Toronto. New manufacturing plants, new immigrants, everything. So, they grow faster than anywhere else in the province. Quit hogging it there.
 
       Two. Public transit, expand your fucking subway lines. I get it. You're slowly starting to realize that you can expand your street cars to make it more accessible to people. And you get city buses running everywhere. You need dedicated high-speed buses that run on the highway system to get people from point A to point B a lot quicker. You need dedicated transit routes. You need brand new subway lines. All of this alleviates car congestion.
 
      We love our cars and we love our big highways, but unfortunately, you've jammed too many people into one area and instead of building them up and forcing them to take public transit and be closer to everything else, you spread them off on this massive expanse, making it so they have to rely on their automobile. And now you're thinking about burying the 401. No, you can't do that. Okay. That's solution besides burying the 401 go back and check an old idea that the city of Toronto had back in the seventies.

​         Before the city of Toronto was, know, Etobicoke, Scarborough, Vaughan, North York, Mississauga, Markham, you know, all those areas kind of merged into the mega city that it is today. I'm sorry, but like all those are actually just the city of Toronto. Okay. The greater Toronto area. And now it's actually called the greater Toronto Hamilton area, the GTHA Okay, Hamilton, you're included with it. Sorry, but Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, you're all part of Toronto. Same with Milton now. It's all Toronto, one mega city.
 
        Back in those days, they couldn't build these expressways from where the 427 meets the 401. There was supposed to be another added highway that was going to cross from there all the way across the DVP Don Valley Parkway onto the 404. It was called the Spadina Expressway. It was only going to be about eight to 10 blocks away from the 401. And it was going to be for a centralized residential travel highway, six lane throughways, the Spadina Expressway going all the way across to alleviate traffic on the 401.
 
         401 was made for transport traffic. They wanted this alternative Expressway, but because Scarborough, Etobicoke, Markham, all these areas were all separate towns. They all fought amongst themselves and wouldn't allow Toronto across their territories to build this. And because at that point in time, things like the 401 weren't under Ontario rule, the Ontario government couldn't push them to say, yeah, we need this. So, tree hugging people that wanted to protect their houses, organized dwellers and townships killed the project. And this project was going to alleviate traffic on the 401, which at that point in time in the seventies wasn't as great as it is now, but they were looking at 50 years in the future and the congestion it would have by now. This highway would alleviate so much of that on top of it. Highway 400 was going to be expanded down Black Creek Drive all the way down to the Gardner Expressway. Allen Road was going to go from the Downsview Airport all the way to the Gardner Expressway as well.
 
       So, you're to have two other carrier roads besides the Don Valley Parkway at one end of Toronto and the 427 at the other end between these two highways. If you're doing 130 on the highway between the two of them is 25 minutes at 130 kilometers an hour, just between the two ends of each other. Okay. That's a long distance, especially in a major city. When you really think about it, there's no crossroads that come down on road. We're supposed to do that.
 
       The Spadina Expressway was supposed to cross over and the 400 was supposed to come down. That would alleviate so much of the traffic back then. Make it so that transports can come all the way from our northern areas, almost into downtown Toronto. When the 407 was built, they didn't extend it all the way out to the 115 to Peterborough and then extend it all the way out to Hamilton. They quickly realized that they needed to expand it to the Hamilton portion. But the other section up to the 115 was just completed a couple of years ago. They created traffic snarl on that highway.
 
        Even though you have to pay to use it, it was getting up there. Now they're planning the 413 as another ring road through the other green belt. Just to let you know, the 401 was built on a green belt, the 407 built on a green belt, and the 413 now is going to be built on the green belt. So, Toronto's lungs are constantly getting brand new highways built on them. If you ever watched the old show about the big highways and cities expanses, I remember watching one about Moscow, Russia, and they did that every single time they put a ring road, it went onto the oxygen area.
 
       Same thing with Toronto. that Spadina Expressway was supposed to alleviate a lot. The Gardiner Expressway, it ends and then it's just surface roads all the way up until just before you hit the 401 at the other side of Scarborough. It was supposed to go along the waterfront to alleviate downtown traffic to the east. So, it didn't have to all go up the Don Valley Parkway. But today,
 
        Because of all these people, all traffic has to move out of downtown Toronto up the Don Valley Parkway to go east on a six-lane highway that they can't expand. They're fucked. So, by extending the Gardner, burying the Gardner from where it ends under Scarborough all the way to the end of the 401 would help alleviate traffic. Freeing the original Spadina Expressway, road and even Black Creek Drive would alleviate more congestion.
 
        I understand this. live in a city that has rock all over the place. There was an accident. Okay. From my, time of recording this podcast, there was actually an accident the previous night when I was taking my son out to Taekwondo. I couldn't get to one area where I was going because there was an accident on the main throughway. Now between entrances to this area, you think it's just a block or two up. No, the city of Sudbury into Minnow Lake, there’s second Avenue. The next entrance is Bancroft and the next entrance is Van Horne, downtown between Bancroft and Second Avenue driving at standard speeds on the roadway between 70 and 80 kilometers an hour. Even if you don't hit any of the traffic lights is five minutes between Bancroft and Van Horn going to downtown even having to go through the traffic lights is 12 minutes. That's a lot of blocks. So, when the one road had an accident the other night, everybody's going through minnow lake causing congestion causing buildup.
 
        If there was another flow through road, like there's planned Silver Hills drive go all the way through, there would be less of a traffic snarl in Minnow Lake. When you get past second Avenue all the way out to moonlight, there's a multitude of different roads that crisscross in and out of it. So, when there's an accident on one, you got a multitude of different ways to get around. And we get it. The city of Toronto has tons and tons of different surface roads. You can get around and get past all of this, but most people don't want to take that.
 
       Transports can't take every single road. For them to get through would take hours to try and figure out the system. It's easier to stay on the highway. So, by burying the original Spadina Express way, essentially between the Don Valley Parkway and the 427, that's about half of what they want to bury on the 401, would alleviate tons of traffic. Allen Road all the way into downtown Toronto would alleviate traffic of the DVP and the 427.
 
      And if you buried on the other side, going all the way up to the 407 and swinging around through Vaughan to connect and become part of the 413, BAM, people get out of town easier. You want to bury something. You don't bury the four one. You bury other planned highways. And that's what the city of Toronto could do. You want to bury something Doug Ford, bury the original Spadina expressway, bury the original planned Allen Road extension, bury the original plan 400 extension, bury the end of the 413 underneath Aurora from the 400 to the 404, because you're going to need it when it opens up. Bradford bypass won't alleviate enough of it. You need another crossroad down there. You need to understand how your traffic works. 

​        See, I live in a city that understands how traffic works. And even though our city doesn't grow, trust me, throughout my life in 40 years, I've been on this planet. I've watched my city go from up to 172,000 and back down to 165 and back up to 168 and back down to 161 and back up to 172 and back down to 165. And now we're actually up to 185 biggest we've ever been, but it's yo-yoed in my 40 years on this planet. And yet we still expand and build other roads, even though our city is expanding extensively, we know how to alleviate traffic built a throughway to alleviate traffic on a main throughway to get truck traffic onto its own road. No, where we need to put crossroads in to alleviate traffic. I used to get stuck in a traffic in the Kingsway around between five and six every single day for 15 to 20 minutes. I get it, people in big cities are probably yelling at their screens right now going, what the fuck you mean, 15, 20 minutes, it's nothing. I get stuck in traffic for hours. I get it, okay, smaller city. When they built the brand-new throughway, there's no traffic. You used to get stuck at the intersection of La Salle and Notre Dame.
 
       For all the people leaving the tax center, leaving downtown, all heading out to the valley. When they expanded that intersection, made it wider, it alleviated that traffic snarl. And when the new three-way was put in, it's like empty all the time because we understood that we needed to build a road close by to alleviate that traffic. We need an alternate route. We also need better planned public transit, which we have done in the past 20 years. Trust me, it's about five times better than it was when I was a kid. Where I used to live, there was three buses a day. Now there's 12.
 
        Okay. I got, it's not five times as four times, but for that area, even where I live, there's about nine buses a day that come out to where I live. And I'm like 20 minutes from the edge of the city, edge of the city, not even downtown. So, plan where you're putting these things. Don't just build them on flat arable land that you could just buy right now. Think about it properly. Plan your infrastructure investments, spending billions upon billions of dollars.
 
       20 years of development to build a 50-kilometer section buried underneath the 401. That's literally going to only be two side by side, three lane highway. So, six lanes on either side, 12 lane highway underneath the 401 is not going to do that much. Considering the fact that the 407 and some areas, the biggest areas can get up to about 10 or 12 lanes on either side. So, 20 to 24 lanes, you're not going to alleviate anything but building a tunnel.
 
       You're going to spend tons of the province's money, put us into massive debt and then tell the rest of us we can't build all of our projects. Remember I said at the beginning of this, there's a 50-year deficit on projects for this province. I'll give you a hint. Here's a few of them. They're not all from my neck of the woods. I know I've complained and bitched about the fact that highway 17, highway 11, highway 69 aren't expanded. They're on this list, but there's a lot more in Southern Ontario that aren't even done. Listen to me right now. Even people living in Southern Ontario, this is your deficit.
 
       And these are planned projects that were thought through between the sixties to the eighties. Okay. And a lot of these have been assessed, planned, and even shown that they're needed, but were never built because the province is literally just too cheap because it doesn't help Toronto. And if it doesn't benefit Toronto, you aren’t getting it. Trust me, Doug Ford. I know you're fucking listening to me right now. Your mentality is that big city, small mind, and trust me.
 
       I know people from the greater Toronto Hamilton area that are big city, small mine. My in-laws and I proved that when they shut down Sudbury downs, big city, small mines, they didn't see that a horse racing track in the city of Sudbury was needed to keep the racing market alive and all of Northeastern Ontario. were the only track. Now everybody has to go to Barrie What happened to all those people with those racetracks and horses? They sold them off because there's nowhere to race. It's too expensive to go down south constantly. Big city, small mind. you're not making tons of money in the smaller market, but the smaller market needs it to keep the industry going. Big city, small mind. Okay. 

​       So, the highways that are hampering growth in Southern Ontario, highway six, go on Google maps. Check these out between the city of Hamilton and the city of Guelph highway six is a full lane accurate road except at the very last cutoff near Morriston, which goes down to two lanes is a major traffic issue. And it needs to be a limited access through a between a city of what what's well like 140,000 people to Hamilton, that's over half a million, like their main traders, and they need to have a limited access through a for truck traffic. Now they're about to build a little bit of an extension up top of the hill.
 
        Now, but highway six was originally planned to be expanded from where it exited on the 401 all the way down to Hamilton in 1968, the 427. They've been talking about expanding this since the seventies from where it meets now, right at the 407 actually goes a little further than that goes to major Mackenzie drive. It's originally planned to go from there all the way up behind Barrie and connect up with 400 closer to penitentiary in Ontario to alleviate traffic so that 400 could be for all the people going to the Muskoka's and 427 could be for all the people going to the Parry Sound cottage area. The 404 from Newmarket to Gravenhurst. They need a secondary highway to go around the back end of Lake Simcoe. That's an area that's growing extensively, especially with Barrie and Innisfil expanding right now. And Innisfil is literally about to explode. Same with Bradford. The 404 going off to Gravenhurst.
 
       Well, the 400 is being utilized for all these other small towns along it. Bradford, Innisfil, Barrie, Orillia, King-Township, hell, even the Cut-Off for Newmarket, they're all utilizing the 400 to ship all their goods. They could use the 404 if the 404 went all the way up to Gravenhurst. It can alleviate all that Northern Ontario traffic coming to downtown Toronto, where we wouldn't have to get all the way off and travel on two-lane secondary roads and help expand an area in Kawartha Heights. Highway 7 expansion between Peterborough and Ottawa. You may not think it's big, but Highway 7 between Peterborough and Ottawa needs to be expanded because it's essentially part of the Trans Canada Highway for one and two would help create a secondary route to the 401 to get from the biggest city in our province or provincial capital to our nation's capital. Right now, we only got the 401 and 416.
 
        And how the 416 wasn't even built until 1997. Before that, you had to drive all the way up to Montreal and back on the 417 to Ottawa if you want to stay in limited access. If you didn't, had to take surface roads through counties. We all know how slow that moves. Highway 17, expanding the 417 from Ottawa all the way to Sault Ste. Marie and then from Nipigon to the Manitoba border for Northwestern and Northeastern expansion. 69 Parry Sound to Sudbury, 68 fucking kilometers. And for the last six years, nothing's been done on it.
 
      Highway 11 North Bay to Timmins with the expansive electric battery in Cobalt, Ontario with the first Cobalt sulphide refinery in all of North America being built there and a brand-new battery recycling facilities and a whole battery park poised to create upwards of 500 jobs for an area that has less than 10,000 people is big news.
 
      But their highways not being expanded either. The Conestoga Parkway from Waterloo, Ontario all the way to Elmira. Hell expanding it from the other side from Waterloo all the way to Stratford Highway eight. That's the one I just talked about essentially from Waterloo all the way into Stratford and all the way on to the 402. So, you can go from Waterloo to the 402 without having to get on the 401. Highway three from Windsor to Leamington. It's planned to be expanded. Hell, shit's been there since the sixties. It has never once been updated. The 406 from Welland to Port Colborne.
 
      Highway 20 from Hamilton to Niagara Falls, Highway 24 from Brantford to Cambridge, Highway 6 from Ancaster to Caladonia, Highway 3 from Fort Erie to Port Colborne. These are all major highways that need to be expanded for the shipment of goods, not for people, for goods, to help these areas expand as we become a unified nation. On top of that, we have cities in our own province that don't have their own ring roads. City of London, City of Ottawa.
 
      The EC row and winds are not even connected to the 401 at both ends, which essentially goes through Chatham, St. Thomas, the expansion of Highway 6 through it. Now with the new Volkswagen plant, I'm surprised they're not expanding that highway from the 401 all the way to the Volkswagen plant. They're going to use surface rows to get all their shit out. There are tons of deficits. We built the 401 as a massive belt to go from Windsor all the way to Quebec, essentially from the US to Quebec. That was done in the 1950s and there's been no other major infrastructure projects like that created in this entire province since that time. 400 slowly moved up towards Sudbury. 11 got turned into a four-lane access road. 115 got expanded. You know, we've added the 417, added the 403, which essentially is also part of the QEW. We've added few little ones to gain access to a few extra cities along the route, but nothing else has been done to help the 401. 

​       A brand-new belt, like we said, that goes from the 402 behind London to Stratford to Waterloo up all the way towards Orangeville and across the New Market and then down to connect to Peterborough would help you alleviate some traffic on the 401 and help from Peterborough all the way to Ottawa. We need another crossroad, the 417 all the way through Northeastern Ontario. Before you put a shovel in the ground to dig underneath the 401, think about it. Think if it's actually good thing to do with an expressway was originally supposed to start at the corner of 403 and East Gate Parkway. It was supposed to have connections to the 427, the 400, Allen Road, DVP, and end of the 401 and Highway 2A. None of these were done. You essentially have one strip through a city of 5 million people to connect it to every other major city close to it. Montreal, Ottawa, Windsor, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, all these other major areas are only connected by one road.
 
       I get at the road six lanes, but the amount of population the province of Ontario has just within that one belt, a six-lane highway isn't going to cut it anymore. You want a nation building project? Two of them for the province of Ontario. One, the 417 from Ottawa all the way to the Manitoba border to alleviate truck traffic issues for crossing our great nation. Number two, a brand-new belt in Southern Ontario running from the 402 all the way to Ottawa instead of burying the 401 build a collector highway kilometers away from it. The 413 could help, but the 413 shouldn't really end at Milton.
 
        Literally, it should go all the way over and connect with the top of Guelph where they're building a brand-new roadway from highway 27 all the way over to between Guelph and Waterloo. That whole brand-new throughway should connect over. The 401 should be our long single belt for trucks and travelers. Feeder highways running from the 402 behind London to Stratford through Kitchener Waterloo up the Guelph, you cut across the top of Brampton over through Vaughan up towards Peterborough and off to Ottawa. You have all your connection highways in a brand-new belt. If you're going to do this thing, you have to do it right.
 
       Like I said, if you're going to bury something, bury the original Spadina Expressway and the Gardner extensions to alleviate these traffic snarls. The reason why the city of Toronto has such a big issue with traffic because there's only one highway that goes east west in that city. You can fight me and say, the 407 does that. No, the 407 connects with it. The 413 is going to connect with it. A three eventually connects with it. The 401 is the only singular belt like Northern Ontario with highway 17. 11 comes around and loops to it and loops off of it. But 17 crosses the entire Northwestern and Northeastern portion of Ontario. And it's not safe right now. So, it needs to be rebuilt, refreshed, and expand using feeder roads between the 403 and a new 401A entrance to move the 403 to the QEW. Essentially burying Allen Road 400 extensions by Expressway Gardner extensions as an alternative to the 401 and creating a shorter route could use the same entry with an ended Allen Road 400 DVP with the future extensions to be added. 

​        The 401 doesn't need to be buried. This is the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard in this entire province. we got the busiest entire highway in North America. Let's put it under construction for the next 20 years creates so many headaches. You know, this is going to do to our economy. If you decide to do that, going with my alternative may cost a bit more, but it'll alleviate more traffic from more cities. But while doing it, let's do it smart.
 
        You're going to build a brand-new highway as like the 413 crossing over the upper ridges all the way from like, let's say EC row comes all the way up goes from the current end of EC Row, essentially is the secondary band for Southern Ontario from Windsor to Ottawa, not Windsor to Montreal Windsor to Ottawa this time crosses over and hits all the upper areas. don't we make it so that the center of this also is wide enough to put either dual or a quad rail system, put a high-speed train in the center of it. So personal traffic can move even quicker. We can get people on public transit using high speed rail.
 
       Rail is something that people would use if it was only great. VIA rail between Toronto and Ottawa is not good. VIA uses CP &CN's rails, but when their freight rails are coming through, VIA gets pushed to the side tracks and has to wait for the other one, which means they get delayed constantly. Dedicated rail routes would help alleviate personal transportation in the province of Ontario between major cities.
 
      An expanse to a secondary ban from Ottawa to Windsor would help alleviate even more. But on top of that, you still have to focus on the fact that Northeastern Ontario still isn't finished. Northwestern Ontario isn't finished. And we've been sitting here waiting for 70 years and we still can't even get breadcrumbs. 401 Tunnel, stupid as motherfucking idea that our province and the biggest asshole to ever come out of the city of Toronto, Doug Ford ever thought of. Yeah, let's put all of our eggs into one basket. Let's see where this shit takes us. Toronto wants to go into construction with the 401 for the next 20 years go right ahead. But the cities of Ottawa and London are going to recoup all of its losses because people are going to realize that these other cities have a lot more to offer them. 

        ​So, if you like this podcast, we'd like share a comment about an unnamed your social feed or streaming sites that you found the AutoLooks podcast on tell us your thoughts about this stupid idea that they have about burying the 401 like really, you got to be a complete brain-dead moron. There are so many other alternatives you can do. And if Doug Ford really wants to sit down with me and go over and hash out a true infrastructure project plan for the province of Ontario, I'm willing to listen and to talk to them. I could tell you a million other great ideas that would alleviate even more traffic than your freaking university educated assholes that you have sitting behind you.
 
        Hell, all of them are from the city of Toronto, so they don't understand how the entire rest of the province works. It's like I always say, you think 17 doesn't have enough traffic on it because you only seen statistics, drive the highway in the middle of fucking winter when it's a snowstorm and tell me differently about how safe the highway really is. And after you've clicked the like button, you know, you've liked us, you followed us, you comment about it. You sent an email.
 
        You shared this with your friends, go to the website, stop by, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings, go to the corporate links website page, big or small, have them all. Car companies from around the globe, all available in one direct location. That is the AutoLooks.net website at the corporate links tab at the top of the page. And stop by, check some of it out and send us an email, send, talk for your own opinion, your own letter, calling them out as a stupid fucking moron.
 
       He's either doing this for smoke and mirrors before he does something even bigger, or he's just literally an egotistic Toronto city dweller, big city, small mine. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over [email protected]. So, for myself, Everett Jay the AutoLooks team, Ecomm Entertainment, and Podbean.com Strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride that the Ontario government is going to take us on with this with this tunnel idea.

Everett J.
​#autolooks