Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[tomh009]

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.