Doug Ford plans to spend billions on building highways. Here are three reasons that is absurd

Negotiated changes to the privatized Highway 407 could deliver benefits sooner and at a lower cost than spending billions on a new highway that will take more than a decade to build.  RICK MADONIK / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

From The Toronto Star, November 9, 2021
By Matt Elliott

The words “highway” or “highways” appear 58 times in the fall economic statement released by Premier Doug Ford’s provincial government last week. It’s a document that spills a ton of ink extolling the supposed virtues of the Highway 413 megaproject and the government’s general commitment to building a lot of new roads, including the Bradford Bypass, with billions worth of spending on highway infrastructure

I am here to point out three ways in which this is absurd.

The first absurdity: the same week Ford’s government was releasing this highway heavy plan, international leaders were gathered in Glasgow for the COP26 conference to talk about climate change. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau opened his conference speech by telling the tale of the town of Lytton, B.C., that literally burned to the ground this past summer after breaking Canadian heat records with temperatures of 49.6 degrees. “We need to do more, and faster,” Trudeau said.

Don’t strain yourself trying to comprehend how the government of Canada calling for the world to do more to combat climate change squares with the government of its largest province planning for billions of public investments into highways — highways that will, in some cases, pave over farmland, cut through the greenbelt, and encourage urban sprawl. It’s impossible to comprehend. It makes no sense.

The second absurdity comes when you consider the government is embarking on this grand highway-building expedition at a time when transportation technology, like the climate, is changing. It seems darn near certain that the mobility of the mid-2030s — when Highway 413 would realistically open — will be different than today.

Self-driving cars are being tested on streets all over the world, and could make highway driving far more efficient by synchronizing speeds. The TTC is already piloting an automated shuttle service. Scaled up, these shuttles could provide on-demand door-to-door service. And “micromobility” is the buzziest of buzzwords — for good reason — with small electric vehicles showing all kinds of potential. At Toronto city hall, billionaire Frank Stronach has registered as a lobbyist to push for permissions to test his new, 3.5-feet-wide, three-wheeled SARIT tiny electric vehicles in the city.

With all this change coming, betting big on highways in 2021 feels like betting big on the fax machine in the mid-1990s as the communication technology of the future.

The third absurdity is specific to Highway 413. Its proposed route, which would extend from Milton to Vaughan, is basically parallel to Highway 407. That highway was built as a public asset and then sold to a private corporation to make the government of the day a quick buck.

The 407 ETR corporation posted financial statements on Oct. 27 showing net income in the third quarter of 2021 of $106.6 million, up from $49.1 million in the same quarter of 2020. The average trip on the toll highway costs $13.60. The highway is the ultimate cash cow, staying profitable even during the worst of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The corporation, partially owned by the Canada Pension Plan, seems well on its way to returning to pre-pandemic profitability, when the highway was posting net income in excess of a half-billion dollars on an annual basis.

It’s easy to imagine an alternative history where that highway remained public and toll rates were set to still bring in millions in revenue that could go toward transit, while also maximizing usage and still maintaining traffic flow.

In public hands, further upgrades could also be easier to pull off. An advisory panel tasked with analyzing the Highway 413 plan in 2017 concluded that adding dedicated, subsidized truck lanes to the 407 would “deliver significant travel time savings” but noted that the current legislation governing the 407 could make those kinds of additions complicated. (The panel also found that imposing congestion pricing across the highway network could deliver travel time savings up to 10 times what’s achievable by building the 413.)

It seems pretty likely that negotiated changes to the privatized Highway 407 status quo could deliver benefits sooner and at a lower cost than spending billions on a new highway that will take more than a decade to build.

But nobody really knows, because Ford’s government doesn’t seem interested in studying alternatives, or studying anything much of anything at all, really. The government doesn’t have answers on basic questions like what this whole plan will actually cost. They haven’t explained environmental impacts, or whether this plan accounts for new technology, or how they’ll pay for maintenance.

Every unanswered question makes the absurdities pile up. And the final absurdity might be that Ontario could spend the next provincial election cycle talking about new highways as a major issue, when there’s so much else this province should be focused on.

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