Making the 401 (and highways in general) less terrible.
Highways aren't good, so how can we make it better?
Toronto’s Highway 401 is interesting.
If you don’t drive, you probably hate it — it’s loud, polluting, and probably its biggest negative externality? Its enormous width. Crossing the 401 can often feel unbelievably difficult and uncomfortable — in fact, it usually is.
Somewhat ironically at the same time, mention the highway to a driver and they are likely to wince: despite moving hundreds of thousands of drivers a day (well, really, because of), the 401 tends to be traffic-snarled and filled with extremely aggressive drivers.
Now, the 401 for better or for worse is important to Toronto, but unfortunately we’ve failed to provide better alternative transport for many people’s journeys, and tons of trucks use the road everyday as well. Had the government not signed away Highway 407 for a century, lowering its tolls might be a great way to shift traffic off the 401 — and then ideally start scaling it down — but unfortunately that’s not how things went.
This got me thinking: growing up on the west coast and making frequent trips to Seattle from Vancouver, the highways seemed… less bad. How could we apply some of the lessons learned in those cities to try to do some harm reduction on one of the biggest urban blights in Toronto?
Of course, the optimal way to “solve” problems with a highway is to just remove the highway — but some highways like Highway 401 are just too important to their cities transportation system to be removed, at least all at once.
Public Transit
You knew I was going to mention transit didn’t you…
While it doesn’t necessarily fix any of the problems with any given highway, adding better public transit helps enormously expand the highways ability to move people, including those who do not want to drive.
The obvious thing to start with especially on the 401 are bus lanes. Bus lanes are a mostly low-cost way to ensure buses keep moving even when general traffic is at a standstill which is good, because buses move far more people! Unfortunately, while bus lanes are good while you are on the highway — they have problems on the 401. That’s because most exits are from the far-right lane, and buses do need to get on-and-off of the highway semi-frequently to serve stops and stations. This means leaving a bus lane and getting over to the side of the road (potentially hitting traffic on the way), unless…
The natural solution to the “the station is off the highway” problem is to move your stations to the highway. Of course, that is not always possible, but where it is it can simplify access for buses and speed trips. If bus lanes are constructed in the median of a highway (which is usually the best location to reduce conflicts with ramps), bus stations with access from bridges or underpasses across the highway can provide convenient access. However, design is critical because highways can be incredibly unpleasant places to wait in the middle of.
Of course, sometimes you can’t bring a station to the highway, whether it be because of space or because an existing station you want to connect to (say Sheppard-Yonge in Toronto) is not directly adjacent to the highway, the best solution is ramp improvements. That can look like a bus lane along a regular highway ramp (allowing buses to pass queues of cars) or it can be an entirely dedicated new bus ramp from your median bus lane (for obvious reasons this is an expensive option). In any case, you should provide bypass lanes for bus ramps and stops so that you can operate a variety of service levels safely and efficiently — which is one of the major benefits of buses!
The last thing that merits mentioning is helping transit get across the highway, which once again mostly comes down to buses. Because highway bridges and overpasses often are not frequently rebuilt and are significant points of congestion, providing a bus lane in these locations provides a lot of bang for your buck. The obvious example of this for me is at Kennedy Road in Scarborough, a location where I’ve crossed the 401 in buses innumerable times, and where things tend to slow down because of congestion.
Environment
The thing about the 401 that brings the most negatives to communities near it is the environmental problems, from auto emissions, to shredded tires, to noise. When travelling along the highway recently with someone from out of town, they were shocked (with good reason frankly) at the amount of high rise development running right against the highway. Of course, it’s really no wonder that condos have a bad reputation among some groups of people when we do things like purposefully site them overlooking a large highway (of course the same NIMBYs who say condos are “unlivable” are also often responsible for this). That being said, Toronto is a growing city and the 401 runs right through it, so development along the 401 is somewhat of an inevitability — and it’s already here, so what can we do to reduce the impact of the 401 on the communities it passes through?
One obvious thing is sound barriers, we already do have those along the 401 (tall concrete wall anyone?) but we could do a lot better, especially because the 401 probably deserves more than the default basic sound mitigation device. A great option that exists in cities internationally is enclosure, and you could potentially do this in selective areas — for example, where density is particularly high.
The cost of sound barriers like this relative to their positive benefit in reducing sound is likely not very high. And just generally deploying more barriers, more widely, which are more attractive and better at mitigating sound seems like a huge win.
The other obvious solution to this problem is placing the highway in tunnels and below grade in cuts and trenches — albeit through cut-and-cover capping, which done right could also reduce some of the barriers to crossing. Again, this is unlikely to be a solution everywhere, but in dense areas it would be a good way to reduce the noise and visual impact on communities. This idea of capping the highway is even the way new sections of the 401 through low density parts of Windsor have been built, so demanding a retrofit through Toronto seems very reasonable.
It also seems pretty obvious that implementing some policies like encouraging evs through tolling them at a lower rate (I personally think tolling the 401, even at a very low level makes a ton of sense), and carpooling to a much greater degree than today would help reduce the environmental impact and capacity of the highway.
Pedestrian and Cycling Routes
The last thing I want to talk about, and the thing that made want to create this article is my many experiences crossing highway 401. To be clear, it’s not always horrible, but it is almost always bad. For example, crossing highway 401 at Yonge Street feels mostly safe (except for a weird wrong direction car intersection on the south side), but it’s a hike, it’s loud, and it’s not direct at all. It’s a compliance connection not one you ever want to use.
Bridging gaps like this that legitimately divide the city for anyone not in a car or transit vehicle would go a long way to reducing the ill effects of the highway. The gold standard solution is probably some form of pedestrian tunnel, that’s because a tunnel can probably be shallower than a bridge needs to be tall, meaning less stairs (elevators tend to exist in such places these days but reliability is a crapshoot). The issue is, for a tunnel to be comfortable it needs to be well lit and spacious — which is expensive!
That being said, such connections be it via bridge or tunnel are absolutely worth it, and if combined with an enhanced cycling or pedestrian corridor that extends a while beyond the immediate area of the highway, they can be more than a mitigation — an improvement!
A great example of how we might aim to fix some of these problems are more greenways under the highway (or over in the case of capping) that tend to provide more space and better separation for humans from cars. We could also take inspiration from Phase 1 of Montreal’s REM which has a number of station entrances under highways which are actually quite pleasant, because they are wide, open, well lit, and often feature seating and bike parking creating small plazas.
Setting a new standard
Ultimately, all of these improvements are only as good as our ability to get any of them implemented, and the reality is transportation budgets are being stretched in 100 different directions, often for other good projects. I would suggest the best way to move forward here is by setting a new standard — or social contract. Society is starting to properly accept that highways are a nuisance, and this means governments coming in to do expansion or honestly even just big renovation are looking to spend money to reduce community opposition to projects. Lining up a number of environment, transit, and pedestrian improvements that will be requested when the government wants to come in to rebuild some ramps or whatever is probably a good approach to getting stuff done and capitalizing on this.
I do wonder how much a fully built Line 5 from YYZ to Kennedy; a Line 4 from Sheppard West to McCowan; and a Line 7 from Kennedy to Malvern could change things on the 401. Probably somewhat, but I also think GO could be a bigger factor, potentially with bus lanes/stations and a Midtown train corridor as well.
When the Turcotte interchange here in Montreal was rebuilt, bus lanes separate from the regular traffic were built in the median; this worked as it is mostly for buses that go many kms just to get to Lionel-Groulx metro station. The path even includes a bus only overpass to get from the center to the Atwater exit. This could be done because the whole area was being rebuilt; I suppose if a large section of the 401 was rebuilt it would be a nightmare during the rebuild, but could include many of the suggestions you've provided. Closer to where I live on the west island, there are many tunnels under hwy 20 that have been there for generations, however to cross hwy 40 it is only the min required sidewalk on a few stroads that cross over. With the REM station at Fairview it has been announced a new pedestrian overpass will be put near where the REM station is, so that is good.