Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[tomh009]

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.