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What do you do when a 18-lane highway can’t handle the 400,000 vehicles a day that pour onto it? A sensible person might conclude that perhaps it’s time to provide options for mass transit. Instead, Ontario Premier Doug Ford has decided to build a second, underground highway under the overwhelmed one on the surface.

Just one more lane. Just one more lane and traffic will be cleared forever.

Toronto’s Highway 401 is the busiest in North America. As the only gateway to Canada’s biggest city, taking on its 18 lanes of traffic feels like rushing down the St. Lawrence if its waters were transformed into a 300-foot-wide asphalt flow. Despite its gigantic size, the 401 is almost permanently jammed.

The world’s longest motorway tunnel is 24.5 kilometers long and is located in Norway. Built between 1995 and 2000, it cost 930 million krone, or around $120 million.

A pharaonic visionary, Doug Ford doesn’t want to beat the record by just a few feet. He wants to double it.

Mr. Ford wants a 50-km-long underground highway beneath the busiest highway in North America. Fifty kilometers. That’s the equivalent of the Confederation Bridge. . . if it went all the way to the other side of PEI.

Virginia Greiman, an international megaproject expert who acted as risk management consultant on Boston’s “Big Dig,” a project that ran from 1982 to 2007, called the Boston underground highway “the largest, most complex and technically challenging highway project in American history.”

The proposed Toronto tunnel under Highway 401 would be four times longer.

Not only the biggest, but the best

But no worries for Ontario taxpayers. Doug Ford assures us that it won’t cost too much because “we’re experts here at tunneling.”

But until we can take the highway under the highway, what does Mr. Ford have in store to alleviate congestion in Toronto? Will the proposed Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act, whose title one can only hope to admire when stamped on lecterns at a press conference, be used to open the 18 stations of the new train line that are finally completed, but mysteriously have still yet to be put into operation? Or to speed up maintenance of the subway tracks, whose sorry state forces trains to travel at 15 km/h over much of the network?

Of course not. The solution to car congestion is to take away people’s options and force them into their cars. Ontario Transport Minister Prabmeet Singh Sarkaria explained that, in fact, congestion comes from “an explosion in bike lanes.” Who would have thought.

As a result, Ontario municipalities will soon have to obtain authorization from the provincial government before replacing a lane of motorized traffic with a bike path. The minister insists that “municipalities are free to install bike lanes where they do not remove traffic.” I suppose that means installing them on the sidewalk. Or building bike tunnels. Why not, since we’re tunnel experts.

Very serious people

Politicians like Mr. Ford and his team are very serious people, don’t get me wrong. As proof, their tunnel idea was applauded by other serious people at the Toronto Region Board of Trade.

You know who else is serious? The engineers who point out that a project like the tunnel under the 401 would be incredibly complex, if only because the necessary ventilation outlets would have to magically find their way around the highway pavement above it. Regardless, and whatever comes out from the feasibility study his government has commissioned, Doug Ford said he won’t take no for an answer.

Other examples of serious people? Researchers who calculate and re-calculate in every conceivable way how it costs less to invest in public transit than to build new roads – and try to remind politicians.

In Quebec, we’ll soon have to deal with Montreal’s Highway 40, which is in a sorry state of repair and represents the next major worksite once the repairs in the Louis-Hyppolite-Lafontaine bridge-tunnel are completed (in 2027, if the delay gods are merciful). One shouldn’t be surprised if the CAQ, which sees Ontario as the yardstick of success, look to our neighbors when the time comes to renovate the only east-west highway on the island of Montreal.

In fact, the urge to dig has once again taken hold of Premier François Legault’s PR team, as they took fright at the polls and decided it was time to revive the third link, in Quebec City.

After the original tunnel between the province’s capital and Lévis, twinned tubes that would include lanes dedicated to public transit, the serious folks in Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault’s office have certainly nailed it: the minister can’t say whether it will be a tunnel or a bridge, where it will be built or how much it will cost, but is unequivocal that the project will be made “irreversible” before the 2026 elections.

Guilbault, who should consider changing the name of her ministry so that no doubt remains about the only one type of transportation she’s interested in, also said with a straight face that “we can’t subordinate the rigor necessary in this kind of project for electoral considerations.”

Last year, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec agreed to overcome the ridiculousness of having to conduct yet another study on its usefulness and that of a tramway. Unsurprisingly, the Caisse’s report came to the same conclusion as all the others before: a third link will be expensive, will do nothing to improve congestion and could even make it worse because of the induced traffic generated by the urban sprawl that will ensue; a tramway, on the other hand, remains a good idea for reducing congestion, especially because Quebec City is under-equipped when it comes to public transit.

Desperate to find a justification, Guilbault twisted a passage in the study to get the Caisse to say that building a third link was a matter of “economic security.” It was so crude that the Caisse publicly contradicted the minister. On the other hand, we’re talking about the same government that invented an index of “bridges per million inhabitants” to try to justify the unjustifiable.

Provincial and federal urban planners

Perhaps the Caisse’s mistake was not to emphasize the economic benefits of the tramway. One wonders whether the risk of seeing the hundreds of millions already invested in the tramway evaporate qualifies as “economic insecurity” in the eyes of Quebec’s premier. Perhaps the economic security argument would convince Legault to step on the tramway accelerator, instead of continuing the systematic sabotage to which his government is prone, in spite of facts and data. Perhaps it would also convince Pierre Poilievre, another wannabe urban planner who doesn’t want to invest “a penny” in the tramway, to maintain federal funding once the ROC has brought him to power.

The important detail that serious people like Ford, Legault, Guilbault and Poilievre see, and that less serious people like us, ordinary citizens, don’t see, is that road construction is an investment that pays for itself in large part thanks to its users, whereas public transit is a pure expense. Or wait, maybe it’s the other way round – you’d have to ask the experts to be sure.