Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[coriander]

Toronto for its size is actually very highway light compared to other North American cities. At least the Gardiner was built in the industrial parts of the city rather than by cutting down neighbourhood.
Inter city highways are okay if they are built when demand is already there and they follow an existing demand corridor. It’s not going to encourage as much sprawl as a completely new build somewhere else. Our cities and the province have decent planning tools to prevent development as well. Often in smaller states a lot of the sprawl they see is in unincorporated areas with very little in the way of restrictions about what can be built.

Toronto is highway light compared with US cities...but I'd rather compare with contemporary Canadian cities, of which there are few...it's probably comparable to, or worse than Montreal, and much MUCH worse than Vancouver.

As for inter-city highways. They aren't inherently bad...no, but they aren't built in a vacuum...they are usually built instead of building effective transit...or competing with transit....

As for sprawl...the last 50 years of 90% suburban development along highway corridors in Canada would like to have a conversation with you. The fact is, comparing us with the US will usually make Canada look good...but we should probably aim higher than the single worst western nation on Earth.

While we definitely ought to look to better examples than the United States, one of the most common themes in discussions of urban motorways in English-language spaces relates to the destruction of existing urban areas to make way for them. This is ubiquitous in American cities where street grids bend into the gravity wells of enormous city-centre interchanges, something conspicuously absent in Toronto. There are definitely a lot of highways. But they were built in greenfield, or in ravines and valleys, or in uninhabited industrial lands. So despite there being a pretty huge number of highways, they don't have the same historical legacy. They certainly did encourage bad development patterns in the 905, though. Sometimes I wonder what Mississauga might have grown like if Metro kept its planning authority over it.