Thumbs Up to the Ontario government for announcing HOV lanes each way for the QEW.
Thumbs Down to the Ontario government for announced the expansion of the QEW from 6 to 8 lanes.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees….
In yet another example of how our old political parties don’t see the big picture (and subsequently focus on silver bullet fixes without fundamentally changing how things are done) the McGuinty government will add 2 HOV lanes to the QEW from Burlington to Toronto, which is an excellent idea, but of course they will do this by adding two new lanes. The Star reports this as an $89 million project.
This is decidedly NOT the Green approach.
Wouldn’t it be less expensive to merely classify the existing inside lanes as HOV lanes and not add any new asphalt? How many millions would this save the Ontario taxpayers?
Those millions could be directed to upgrades in public transit to so that people stuck in traffic have a better option and might just choose to get out of their cars, thus alleviating traffic congestion without the new asphalt.
But no, to continue the business as usual approach, the HOV lanes will be new asphalt, which will somewhat lighten the load on the rest of the highway for a while, but eventually population growth will catch up and the QEW will fill to the same level of traffic congestion with yet another missed opportunity to invest in public transit.
These people just don’t get it.
Vote Green. It’s the better way.
