Ontario Premier Doug Ford is in a populist mood these days, the likes of which we haven’t really seen since his days as sidekick to his brother Rob at Toronto City Hall. In recent days he has advised homeless people living in encampments to “get off your a-s-s” and get a job — a tad simplistic, I hope we can agree; he has announced the speed limit on 400-series highways will be raised from 100 to 110 km/h — as if that really matters when you’re averaging six; and he has proposed buying the privately owned, tolled Highway 407 — essentially a ring road around Toronto — which is the last bastion of non-gridlock in the entire region.
All pale before what I propose we call the Big Doug, in honour of Boston’s famous 16-year “Big Dig” fiasco: He wants to build one of the longest tunnels in the world, underneath Highway 401, stretching some or the entire distance across the City of Toronto.
This is happening, Ford assures us. “We’re going to get the job done, mark my words.” he told reporters. The only question is how long this tunnel would be, which is why they’ve launched a “feasibility study.”
“If they’re telling me, 30 kilometres is x (dollars), 40 kilometres is y, and 70 kilometres or 60 kilometres is another cost, let’s take a look at it,” he told reporters.
Now I’m all for thinking big, and I don’t want to suggest that such a tunnel is not, in fact, “feasible.” Humankind has done some remarkable things over the years. Ancient Roman engineering is jaw-dropping to this day: The soaring aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, carried water into the 1970s. The Rapa Nui built and hauled those crazy statues all over Easter Island hundreds of years before anyone thought of internal combustion. China has built nearly 40,000 kilometres of high-speed rail since 2008.
But we’re not the ancient Romans, we are not the Polynesians of antiquity, and we most assuredly are not the modern Chinese. We are Ontario. This is a province where the biggest transit project in a generation, the Eglinton-Crosstown LRT line, is pretty much finished — and yet not only can no one in charge provide an opening date, they can’t even tell us why they can’t provide an opening date. (My theory is they accidentally punctured Cthulhu’s lair and have him very tenuously contained beneath what’s supposed to be Yonge-Eglinton Station.)
Conservative governments are supposed to realize their own limitations. Ford has never been any kind of coherent conservative, but the Big Doug is really stretching a point.
Ford and his government will have been pleased, though, with the high-pitched reaction to this cockamamie plan. One hundred urbanists who wouldn’t vote Progressive Conservative to save their mothers’ lives rolled their eyes en masse, stamped their feet and shrieked aloud, “hasn’t this clod heard of induced demand?”
This is an entirely fair question, don’t get me wrong. It is not difficult to demonstrate that vehicular traffic in big cities generally increases to fill the amount of space we allocate to it, and nor should it be counterintuitive. Imagine that, say, 80 minutes is the average maximum journey commuters are willing to tolerate making by car into a city centre. Now imagine you open up some new lanes and cut that, in theory, down to 75 minutes. Suddenly there will be a whole lot more people willing to jam their cars in there in search of an 80-minute commute.
But politics in North America is decades away from even acknowledging this reality. We build more lanes where we can, and maybe we buy a highway, like 407, with tolls on it — road pricing being the only halfway reliable way of actually controlling congestion — and we make it free. It costs a fortune we don’t have, and then we wonder why it isn’t “working.”
That’s not the main reason why the tunnel is a loopy idea, though. It’s a loopy idea because it’s a nominally fiscal conservative government planning to drop untold tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars to bring people into the city who could much more cost-efficiently be brought into the city by public transit — a file on which Ford’s government, much to its opponents’ chagrin, and despite the Eglinton-Crosstown fiasco, has quite a solid record and generally seems proud to stand behind.
The Tories are building the Ontario Line to take pressure off existing lines and link much-underserved areas of Toronto to rail transit. (This was the white whale of Toronto transit planning for half a century.) They are maintaining the previous government’s commitment to increasing regional GO rail service, and then some. In 2017 there were three daily weekday trips from Kitchener to Toronto; today there are eight. In 2019 there were six daily weekday trips from Hamilton to Toronto; today there are 14. Electrifying the GO train lines will shave significant time off those trips, thanks to quicker starts and stops, and whatever the Big Doug costs could probably pull that off three times over.
There isn’t much point trying to lecture modern Canadian conservative parties on the virtues of road pricing, or market solutions in general. It’s a populist moment, and there’s nothing less populist than the free market. But what is the point of a nominally conservative party if it’s the party of back-of-a-napkin gajillion-dollar megaprojects that are only even theoretically supportable if we have a lot of faith in government … which we don’t, nowadays, and rightly so? A nominally conservative party with any such ambitions should be trying first and foremost to rebuild trust in government’s much-more basic functions.
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