Canada

Everyone on here and Reddit guffaws about this plan and likes to clown on it, but I honestly think most are just blinded by their deserved dislike of Ford.

There is honestly some rationality behind it, and imho, building and completing virtually any tunnel is better than pissing time away arguing and building nothing.

Points in favour of the tunnel:

1. he's increasingly talking about it including transit, which gives us a new express east west subway going across what is increasingly becoming the center of the geographic city.

2. Toronto is fundamentally badly positioned geographically. We are in the middle of the trans Canada highway which means that cross province traffic flows through us, we are the major regional hub, meaning that regional traffic is constantly driven to and through us, we are completely water locked to our entire south for a significant distance in either direction, the only major cities near us are also directly on the same highway on either side. We are setup completely linearly, instead of a networked 2D shape which creates a huge amount of East-West traffic pressure.

3. Right of way: yeah people guffaw about tunnelling under an active highway, but quite frankly, the engineers I know don't. It certainly seems a hell of a lot of easier to manage and coordinate than tunnelling under any of the rest of Toronto that has subways and buildings and massive sewer mains already in place.

4. Any tunnel will increase traffic flow. The arguments around induced demand are valid from an individual's perspective, but not the system as a whole's. Traffic will still eventually slow to the same crawl that it does now for an individual driving in their car, but now you will have double the number of cars travelling on that road at the same time increasing overall throughout. Obviously nowhere near as efficient as transit, but again, that's being included as well.

5. By the sounds of it, this wasn't even the Ford government's idea. From the reporting I've seen it sounds like multiple different construction consortiums submitted unsolicited proposals for a project like this. Maybe they were solicited on the low, but it would not surprise me if the construction companies who have their employees and engineers stuck on and working on that highway constantly came up with the idea independently.

Like I personally think tunnelling through downtown would make more sense to alleviate the worst traffic, but it is also pretty much guaranteed to be way way way more expensive and would again concentrate infrastructure in an already overcrowded area, rather than try to build a Moree mid sized region.

Edit: lol at the many downvotes with literally zero actual arguments against anything I said. Way to prove me wrong about just reflecting opposing things /s.