afransen
Senior Member
The ramps are not the bottleneck. Downtown is gridlocked.
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- Thread starter UrbanAffair
- Start date
max
Active Member
OK, so I feel compelled to remind everyone that the fantasy tunnel we're supposed to be talking about here is the one under the 401. The off topic digression on the Gardiner ramped itself up 3 pages ago now.
ARG1
Senior Member
evandyk
Senior Member
Given that all the tunnels are fantasies, it's probably fine for this thread to go a little off-topic. As long as we limit it to fantasy tunnels. There are other threads for fantasy railways.
north-of-anything
Active Member
What if there was a tunnel that continued from the east end of the 403, along the Eglinton alignment, then northwards to the south end of the 400? It would be a construction nightmare, but it would divert a lot of local traffic off of the most congested section of the 401.
Sunnyside
Senior Member
I dunno about that. I always conceptualized the 427-404 section as the busiest, with the 403-409/427 being a runner up, or a subsection of it, for highlighting the lack of continuous express lanes. If you built this, you’d just solidify the 400-404 section as the busiest. There’s not really any diversion happening- there’s nowhere else for the traffic to go…
I would say that hydro corridors offer a lot of alignment potential if we’re trying to eke out more efficiency in this area, though.
crs1026
Superstar
Good point. Maybe burying high voltage cables, while not cheap, would free up surface land that can be used to build…..something….. that’s cheaper than a tunnel. One would still want to compare cost, benefit of transit solutions to roadways and/ or a combination.
- Paul
Sunnyside
Senior Member
Certainly not cheap, but iirc from the many discussions of fantasy proposals using them, it’s dismissed more often than it needs to be.
A new consensus on the ‘where and when’ would be good. In the context of a LRT, sure it’s a bad idea. But when you’re trying to locate a road, highway, or rail line, then burying cables on a clear ROW beats tunneling that infra itself. Burying lines is also generally good for its own sake. Some hydro corridors are very… intrusive.
micheal_can
Senior Member
And...lets build the former freeways planned for Toronto, all as tunnels.
north-of-anything
Active Member
Didn't this thread just go over why not to do that for three pages?
micheal_can
Senior Member
My response was in response to the one about tunneling other highways to it. I do think the tunnel under the 401is a bad idea, but if we are stuck with doing that, then lets build the unbult highways,like the Spadina freeway to connect the 401 better to downtown. Basically, have the 401 tunnel connect to the tunnels of all the planned but never built freeways, all as tunnels.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1vvj76ySbb0GzldaTLi5fr5J1Rqo&usp=sharing
afransen
Senior Member
How on earth would that help? That tunnel would be immediately gridlocked.
north-of-anything
Active Member
The only freeway tunnel that could be seriously considered in the Toronto area is the Gardiner from Strachan to Sherbourne, and even then I doubt the benefits.
micheal_can
Senior Member
The tunnel Ford proposed will be gridlock within 5 years of it opening, unless it has high tolls. And this goes back to "What could we do with $55Billion that would actually make a difference for more people?" I feel this is kinda the Smartrack for Ford. It may even be a way Ford will argue for transit investment at all levels of government.
rbt
Senior Member
If we have a spare $100B to burn on a single infrastructure project, a 50km submerged floating tunnel from St Catharines to downtown Toronto would be interesting as a method of adding a lot of additional land within a 1-hour commute.