Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[MidTowner]

If we accept that cars are necessary (or at least significantly more efficient) in a lot of cases - then we absolutely need to have infrastructure that allows them to be used.  The mere presence of a road isn't enough to be considered a link between two places.  It needs to be a road that has the capacity to serve the demand.  So saying something like "the only difference is an increase in capacity" seems kind of silly to me.  That can be a very meaningful difference.

How could we accept that cars are significantly more efficient in a lot of cases? We’re talking about populated areas here- cars are wildly less efficient in terms of space and energy and all-in costs than transit. And, of course, we know that creating more capacity is a mug’s game- the capacity will induce the extra demand needed to congest it. And we know that highway expansions like this one encourage sprawl, which is costly and inefficient in all kinds of ways.

We probably can’t have good transit between Guelph and KW with the predominant development patterns in both cities. It’ll take time to change that pattern, and maybe it won’t happen until it really has to. So it’s true that the highway is certainly needed given existing development patterns and the massive car dependency in both cities.