Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[Canard]

I'm trying to imagine this - does it happen anywhere else on the 401?  It seems to give reason to all those drivers who insist on sitting only in the centre lane of the 401.

Here's are some very crude drawings, and I've tried to mark the effective lane capacity.  Here's how it used to be:

   

Here's how it is now:

   

Here's how it will be in 2019 (or whenever!), which will be absolutely fantastic based on human dynamics:

   

So, you can see the previous arrangement got wider, before it got narrower again - which gives people time to merge and shift over.  But the new arrangement creates two restriction points (for both 401 and 8), before it goes back to being 3 lanes again. As Markster says, it's temporary for construction, but I wish they'd found some other way to maintain a minimum legacy capacity through here, instead of making it worse before it gets better.

The new arrangement will have no restriction points, and the rightmost lane (5) will peel off at 24, then the 2nd (lane 4) will peel off at Franklin.  Beautiful.