Transportation policies too politicized

It was a long time coming, but the news out of Queen's Park that a call for tenders has been issued for widening Highway 10 between Caledon Village and Orangeville is surely to be welcomed.

Although there was mention of the planned construction in the McGuinty government's spring budget, the lack of any visible activity along the right-of-way led us to worry that another excuse had emerged to put off the long-needed project.

But if the information conveyed to Elizabeth Hall (the Orangeville lawyer who's running for the Liberals in the Oct. 10 provincial election) is accurate, construction work should start in September on the 7.5-kilometre stretch between the northern outskirts of Caledon Village and the recently widened roadway on Orangeville's southern outskirts.

Sorely needed as this project is, it still falls short of providing a solution to the highway's worst bottleneck, at the junction with Peel Road 24 in the village. As any regular commuter will tell you, northbound traffic on Friday afternoons is sometimes backed up to the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, and on a holiday weekend it can take up to 20 minutes to get through the village.

Despite the fact that the widening has seemingly been planned for at least 20 years, the work through the village is going to be done as a second phase, apparently because the Ministry of Transportation still hasn't finished the design work and related property acquisitions.

Indeed, one might suspect that the entire project would have been postponed for another year or so, were it not for the fact that this is an election year.

As we see it, politics has always played too much of a role in the transportation policy area, and not just in Ontario.

We're not sure that there is anything that could properly be described as a national transportation policy. Successive federal governments have had no coherent national highway policy since the decision 70 years ago to team up with the then nine provinces in building the Trans-Canada Highway. And in Ontario, even the TCH remains a substandard two-lane roadway for most of its length.

It will be interesting, indeed, to see whether any of the three parties that currently have seats in the Ontario Legislature will make credible commitments in the transportation policy area during the election campaign.

As we see it, there ought to be a commitment to long-range planning as one means of de-politicizing the projects.

As one small example, there should be a 20-year plan for Ontario's 400-series highways that at least shows roughly where roads like Highway 410 will eventually go. (Although one might think its ultimate role should be to give speedy access to the Bruce Peninsula recreational area, the only commitment thus far is to complete it to a junction with Highway 10 at the Brampton- Caledon border.)

Another policy area that ought to be addressed is that of cost-sharing among the various levels of government.

Ideally, Canada should have something similar to the Interstate system in the United States - national freeways, the cost of which would be shared by the federal and provincial governments.

In our view, the same approach should be followed for other roadways in Ontario, with the provincial government continuing to pay the costs involved in building and maintaining provincial highways and sharing the cost of county, regional and municipal rural roadways, based on periodic studies of the traffic actually using them.

Speed limits constitute another area that in Ontario is prone to far too much political influence.

As matters stand, successive governments of all political stripes have failed to take the issue of speed laws out of the political arena by establishing consistent rules and an independent commission to apply them.

In our view, the safest speed on any given road is that at which the majority of drivers will go, cognizant as they are of the standard to which the roadway has been built.

While Ontario's freeways have been designed to be safe (weather permitting) at 120 km/h, and while that's the speed of most of the vehicles, the perceived need for ticket revenue has kept the limit to 100 km/h. In other provinces the posted limit on ordinary two-lane highways is either 90 or 100 km/h, but in southern Ontario it's usually 80 km/h and in spots like rural Caledon it can be as low as 40 km/h thanks to politicians who curry favour with residents who object to the fact a formerly gravel road has a smooth asphalt surface that attracts commuters.