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+--- Thread: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road (/showthread.php?tid=75)
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - taylortbb - 05-21-2020
(05-20-2020, 07:31 PM)jeffster Wrote:(05-20-2020, 03:32 PM)taylortbb Wrote: That seems defeatist. If we had two-way all-day GO trains running Kitchener to Toronto, every 30 mins or better, 60 min end-to-end travel time, I bet we'd make a huge dent in 401 passenger volumes. That doesn't even require the ambitious HSR proposals, running some EMUs and upgrading the track to class 5/6 standards would do. GO had a proposal to do something similar for Toronto-Hamilton they called Super GO.
The only reason we need to keep widening the 401 is that we refuse to invest in any alternatives. We're stuck in a cycle of "people don't take trains because service sucks" so "let's not improve trains because no one uses them" so "people don't take trains because service sucks" so....
Not sure if even a good quality GO system would put a huge dent in it. You have a family and friends, and anything by train is too expensive, and too time consuming. Last time it cost us $120 round trip from Kitchener to Toronto plus $24 for TTC, grand total was close to $150. Never again. 401 to Downsview Station, $15 gas ($1.15 per litre), $5 parking, and $24 TTC. Transit was the most expensive component still, but total cost less than 1/3.
That means we're doing a bad job of pricing structures. We're probably over charging for transit for families (need better family passes and so on), and under charging for vehicles (gas taxes don't nearly cover the full cost of highway maintenance, never mind the capital costs). Obviously $150 roundtrip to Toronto for a family is not reasonable.
In any case, the average persons per vehicles on our roads is 1.1. The vast majority of trips are single occupant vehicles, where price structures are already competitive. We don't need to get 100% of passenger cars off the 401, but getting half of them would a MASSIVE win.
(05-20-2020, 07:31 PM)jeffster Wrote: It isn't just a matter that 'service sucks' - any sort of transit isn't geared to families, those with disabilities, those who don't have copious amounts of time on their hands, and those that don't live close to the mains.
Now, if you're single, without children, not taking care of an elderly parent, don't have a disability, you have time, then sure, transit is better.
Transit doesn't have to be slower. I did specify 1 hour DTK to Union. That's easily achievable for a train, without getting in to HSR, but is much faster than driving. Transit shouldn't require one have "copious amounts of time on their hands", it only does because of poor service. Do you believe the entire population of NYC, a city famous for being in a rush, has "copious amounts of time on their hands"? They clearly use transit a lot.
Obviously WR won't have NYC-style subways everywhere anytime soon. However, the belief that transit is inherently incompatible with families doesn't hold up if one examines many other cities around the world. Somehow in Japan, even in smaller WR sized cities, this would be considered totally normal, but in North America it's considered totally inconceivable. Yes, our cities are different, but only because we have chosen for them to be different.
(05-20-2020, 07:31 PM)jeffster Wrote: I sometimes wonder for those people that don't drive, and/or those that hate cars, even have a slight understanding why people actually drive.
This is just insulting, but it's also inaccurate. I own a car. I'm also from Toronto, so I go there a lot to see friends/family. I do almost all of my trips by driving there, because it's the most convenient way to do so right now. I completely understand why people make that choice, because I make that choice too. If the GO service I described existed, I'd rarely drive.
(05-20-2020, 07:31 PM)jeffster Wrote: Though I think in the future transit will be different -- we'll have self driving vehicles that can pick up people and families at a cost that is more favourable than car ownership. But that's still a ways away.
Many decades away I'd say. Far enough that it's not worth planning our cities around a technology that might happen in decades. We have problems to solve now, and need to use the technologies we have now.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - clasher - 05-21-2020
Self driving cars aren't going to be a thing anytime soon, if ever.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - jamincan - 05-21-2020
I commute to Mississauga everyday, so I think it's fair for me to speak as someone who relies primarily on driving to get around. Further expansion in Cambridge is in no way, shape, or form justified at this time. I think that there are some improvements that could be made on the eastbound section that would further improve efficiency there largely through painting lanes a bit differently, but traffic moves well in that stretch and I don't believe for a second that money spent now would offer even a minute of time saving for drivers for the foreseeable future.
The 401 through Milton and the western part of Mississauga, on the other hand, was consistently a significantly congested point. Covid-19 has changed that and while traffic volume has increased, it's not yet at a level where volume is congested simply due to heavy traffic. Nevertheless, widening through Milton and Mississauga will have an effect, even if it is temporary.
Part of my problem with this particular widening is that it's preemptive to a ridiculous degree. Infrastructure projects take a long time to go from conception to completion, so I understand that we have to anticipate demand to a certain extent, but a *huge* part of that is the planning process. Actual construction can feasibly happen in a few seasons. I have been told that the 401 widening right now in Milton is supposed to be complete in as few as three years, which I believe given the blistering pace of construction at the moment. You can't make me believe for a moment that the 401 from Hespeler to Townline will be experiencing regular congestion of more than a few minutes in 10 years let alone 3 years when this work might be complete. Why do we so easily justify spending massive amounts on road infrastructure, then, when we don't do the same for other kinds of infrastructure. We let our healthcare system burst at the seams and we bump class sizes up rather than spend more money on healthcare or education, but a hypothetical two minute delay in a commute twenty years in the future is somehow something we have to spend money to fix now.
This is problematic on a larger scale as well, though. Market forces influence transportation decisions. Right now I commute to Mississauga by car. I do that because it's the choice that is most practical at this time. If there was better and more affordable transit infrastructure, I might be more inclined to do that. If the cost (both in time and money) was great enough, I might be forced to either choose to live in Mississauga, or find other work in KW. The point is simply that choosing to spend large amounts of money widening the 401 is an almost certainly permanent and irreversible alteration of the market of transportation choices in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor. This widening reduces the "friction" of driving between Toronto and Kitchener which will inevitably mean that the market will move to more people using that option, all other things being the same. It means that distributors for the western parts of the GTA will be more likely to consider locating in KW or Guelph where land is cheaper knowing they have good road access into the GTA. There are a whole host of other downstream effects. Encouraging people to take transit more, or live closer to work, or businesses to locate on more expensive land more central to their core clients - all good policies - will be all the more expensive and challenging in the face of this.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - ijmorlan - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 07:04 AM)clasher Wrote: Self driving cars aren't going to be a thing anytime soon, if ever.
And even if they will be, they still won’t work in dense urban areas, and won’t be efficient for lots of people taking almost the same trip, which is what we’re talking about in this topic. This is just geometry and math, nothing about the details of the technology itself.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - ijmorlan - 05-21-2020
(05-20-2020, 09:06 PM)tomh009 Wrote: I would support occupant-based tolling for passenger cars on the 401 (three and it's free, or something like that), and wear-based for transports. That would likely reduce the number of cars substantially (and improve our CO2 emissions while we are at it) but it would be a very hard sell politically.
I can’t stand HOT (High-Occupancy Toll), meaning low-occupancy vehicles pay while full vehicles don’t.
Just charge an appropriate toll per vehicle. That gives people the incentive to carpool without the — how can I put this delicately? — enforcement challenges of HOT. The congestion and road wear caused by a vehicle do not depend significantly on the occupancy of the vehicle so there is no valid rationale for charging differently.
Quote:But we don't have a rail network that can take over the goods transportation. Have you ever observed the rail shipments coming into Kitchener? We need better trains, more parallel tracks, better crossings -- and a denser network in the first place. And it would still be difficult to displace the trucks coming from Michigan or Quebec. I simply don't think we have the capability or capacity that many other countries do.
Right, we don’t have the rail network. That’s because we haven’t built it. Essentially you’re saying we have to build highways because we don’t have a good rail network. Do you ever slow down and consider that maybe there is a problem with that thinking? In fact, you just gave the main argument why this highway investment is a malinvestment — because it should be spent on the rail network, both passenger and freight.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - danbrotherston - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 07:59 AM)ijmorlan Wrote:(05-21-2020, 07:04 AM)clasher Wrote: Self driving cars aren't going to be a thing anytime soon, if ever.
And even if they will be, they still won’t work in dense urban areas, and won’t be efficient for lots of people taking almost the same trip, which is what we’re talking about in this topic. This is just geometry and math, nothing about the details of the technology itself.
The 401, which almost certainly will be suited to self driving cars. The problem is that if people drive cars up the 401, they will *also* drive them to their destinations in the dense part of the city. Freight doesn't necessarily have this problem.
As for when self driving cars are coming, I think it's a lot sooner than you folks think, I suspect they are already safer than average human drivers (remember, humans are a very very low bar) and as soon as it's feasible (i.e., as safe as a professional human driver) you can bet that the T&L industry will stop employing drivers--who are very expensive and cannot drive 24/7, whether you choose to buy a self driving car or not, they're coming.
The important point, which you pointed out, is that they are not a mass transit solution, and if the idea is simply to replace human driven cars with self driven cars, we will be making our cities even worse.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - tomh009 - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 08:07 AM)ijmorlan Wrote:Quote:But we don't have a rail network that can take over the goods transportation. Have you ever observed the rail shipments coming into Kitchener? We need better trains, more parallel tracks, better crossings -- and a denser network in the first place. And it would still be difficult to displace the trucks coming from Michigan or Quebec. I simply don't think we have the capability or capacity that many other countries do.
Right, we don’t have the rail network. That’s because we haven’t built it. Essentially you’re saying we have to build highways because we don’t have a good rail network. Do you ever slow down and consider that maybe there is a problem with that thinking? In fact, you just gave the main argument why this highway investment is a malinvestment — because it should be spent on the rail network, both passenger and freight.
We built the rail network maybe 150 years ago. Not significantly enhanced since. Getting capacity to run GO trains is super difficult and we have far, far too many level crossings. These are things we need to solve (and if you read my messages here, you will see that I strongly support rail) but they take a long time to do, and building new rail lines would take even longer due to the need for extensive expropriation and crossing construction. So to say that we can redirect any substantial amount of truck traffic to freight rail today by just charging tolls to the trucks is simply disingenuous.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - KevinL - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 02:19 AM)taylortbb Wrote: We're probably over charging for transit for families (need better family passes and so on)
Do we ever! Family-pass arrangements have gotten WORSE since Presto and other cards have been introduced because they don't easily handle multiple passengers on one card (and cards don't easily coordinate).
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - clasher - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 08:07 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: As for when self driving cars are coming, I think it's a lot sooner than you folks think, I suspect they are already safer than average human drivers (remember, humans are a very very low bar) and as soon as it's feasible (i.e., as safe as a professional human driver) you can bet that the T&L industry will stop employing drivers--who are very expensive and cannot drive 24/7, whether you choose to buy a self driving car or not, they're coming.
I doubt that self-driving cars are safer than humans right now, Autonomous vehicle safety myths and facts. The blog is full of great information and analysis of whatever solid data the author can find. In that link near the bottom is a little blurb about Tesla autopilot and a flawed study the NHTSA. There is a link on the sidebar to the 2020 numbers, and a lot of other interesting stuff that I don't really understand since I'm not a tech person.
Elon Musk said a few years ago we'd have self-driving cars in 2020, so did a lot of people in 2010 and 1995, and so on. It's been "coming" for a long time apparently but it's still not here and probably won't be for decades.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - KevinL - 05-21-2020
It's the fusion power of our time - they always say it's '20 years away' no mater when they say it.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - tomh009 - 05-21-2020
And even if the technology works, regulations are not ready. Audi has Traffic Jam Pilot (Level 3 automation, with hands-off driving on geofenced roads, typically highways) for their A8 but they have now decided to drop it altogether for the current model since no regulator has sorted out the rules yet.
2025, maybe, for Level 5. Snake-oil salesmen may continue to promise it sooner, though.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - danbrotherston - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 10:51 AM)tomh009 Wrote:(05-21-2020, 08:07 AM)ijmorlan Wrote: Right, we don’t have the rail network. That’s because we haven’t built it. Essentially you’re saying we have to build highways because we don’t have a good rail network. Do you ever slow down and consider that maybe there is a problem with that thinking? In fact, you just gave the main argument why this highway investment is a malinvestment — because it should be spent on the rail network, both passenger and freight.
We built the rail network maybe 150 years ago. Not significantly enhanced since. Getting capacity to run GO trains is super difficult and we have far, far too many level crossings. These are things we need to solve (and if you read my messages here, you will see that I strongly support rail) but they take a long time to do, and building new rail lines would take even longer due to the need for extensive expropriation and crossing construction. So to say that we can redirect any substantial amount of truck traffic to freight rail today by just charging tolls to the trucks is simply disingenuous.
But we don't *NEED* too, in fact, we don't need to divert a substantial amount of any traffic today, this widening is being done on the assumption that we won't divert ANY traffic at all for 10 years. 10 years is more than enough time to make meaningful changes in transportation, if we chose too.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - danbrotherston - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 11:33 AM)clasher Wrote:(05-21-2020, 08:07 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: As for when self driving cars are coming, I think it's a lot sooner than you folks think, I suspect they are already safer than average human drivers (remember, humans are a very very low bar) and as soon as it's feasible (i.e., as safe as a professional human driver) you can bet that the T&L industry will stop employing drivers--who are very expensive and cannot drive 24/7, whether you choose to buy a self driving car or not, they're coming.
I doubt that self-driving cars are safer than humans right now, Autonomous vehicle safety myths and facts. The blog is full of great information and analysis of whatever solid data the author can find. In that link near the bottom is a little blurb about Tesla autopilot and a flawed study the NHTSA. There is a link on the sidebar to the 2020 numbers, and a lot of other interesting stuff that I don't really understand since I'm not a tech person.
Elon Musk said a few years ago we'd have self-driving cars in 2020, so did a lot of people in 2010 and 1995, and so on. It's been "coming" for a long time apparently but it's still not here and probably won't be for decades.
The article you linked is at the URL: https://blog.piekniewski.info/ which is a big tip off that this is not a rigourous evaluation. The author has basically just assumed that a self driving car, when it requires the driver to take over, would instead have crashed, this is clearly a nonsense assumption, since the vehicle could instead have "stopped".
All of the statements you make are related to Elon Musk are true, he is at this point, at best a snakeoil sales man at best, and a raving lunatic at worst, only true fanboys do not realize this yet. Yes, he has done some great things, he has been able to effectively run an EV company and a space launch company, but he has not proven himself beyond that. I used to respect him, I don't anymore.
Waymo is by far the most advanced self driving system, and comparisons with it are what we should talk about, as it demonstrates what is possible today with today's technology. Now I'm not saying that self driving cars are ready today, I'm saying that they are so close as to be clearly foreseeable soon.
As for their actual safety right now, they absolutely are safer than humans, remember, humans are TERRIBLE they kill tens of thousands of people every year in the US seriously injure hundreds of thousands and get involved in millions of collisions--MILLIONS. Even per mile, self driving cars are doing better than that right now, waymo by far.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - timio - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 07:34 AM)jamincan Wrote: Part of my problem with this particular widening is that it's preemptive to a ridiculous degree.
When this project was planned, backups were regularly occurring westbound through Townline and, in the case of an accident, through the OnRoute and beyond. Since the 8-Hespeler section opened, that has dropped to seldom. The worst you get now is the slowdown at Hespeler EB where trucks slow down going uphill and the not really well signed merge from 4>3 lanes occurs.
Cheaper, more realistic solution: resurface and potentially add a 4th lane for EB traffic through Franklin. Although the base may be in worse shape than it seems and require a full rebuild to ensure safety moving forward.
RE: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road - tomh009 - 05-21-2020
(05-21-2020, 11:47 AM)danbrotherston Wrote:(05-21-2020, 10:51 AM)tomh009 Wrote: We built the rail network maybe 150 years ago. Not significantly enhanced since. Getting capacity to run GO trains is super difficult and we have far, far too many level crossings. These are things we need to solve (and if you read my messages here, you will see that I strongly support rail) but they take a long time to do, and building new rail lines would take even longer due to the need for extensive expropriation and crossing construction. So to say that we can redirect any substantial amount of truck traffic to freight rail today by just charging tolls to the trucks is simply disingenuous.
But we don't *NEED* too, in fact, we don't need to divert a substantial amount of any traffic today, this widening is being done on the assumption that we won't divert ANY traffic at all for 10 years. 10 years is more than enough time to make meaningful changes in transportation, if we chose too.
As I said in another post, diverting some traffic (or intensifying the car transport by increasing the average number of passengers) is certainly feasible, assuming a (provincial) government is willing to take on highway tolling and/or increased fuel/CO2 taxes and spend its political capital on it.
The post above, though, was pointing out that diverting substantial freight traffic to rail is not feasible today.