Doug Ford's 401 tunnel vision could come with a nearly $100B price tag, expert says
Ford defends plan for tunnel, calls PCs a party of 'visionaries'
Doug Ford's plan for a tunnel under Highway 401 has gone from a surprise announcement to a full on re-election pledge.
And according to one expert's cost estimate, it could be a near $100-billion idea, which would make it the single-most expensive Ontario election promise in the last 10 years, if not the province's history.
In September, the PC leader, who was then premier, said his government would explore a tunnel for drivers and public transit under the 401, with a feasibility study to follow. On his re-election campaign in February, Ford said, "We're going to get that tunnel built."
Little is known about the plans for the tunnel aside from the fact that the Ministry of Transportation says it could go from Brampton or Mississauga in the west to Scarborough or Markham in the east — a massive, costly, roughly 55-kilometre long project that some say may not solve Toronto's traffic woes.
The cost of the tunnel would likely exceed $50 billion, according to Brian Garrod, a past president of the Canadian Tunnelling Association who worked on the Channel Tunnel (or chunnel) connecting England with France as well as several major subway projects in Toronto.
That estimate is based on the 3.2 kilometre, $3.3-billion US State Route 99 Tunnel that was finished in Seattle, Washington in 2019. But the price of the 401 tunnel is likely much higher, given the Seattle tunnel was budgeted in American dollars and constructed more than half a decade ago, Garrod said.
"Since it was finished in 2019, that number should be inflated just to bring it up to today's date. And that would probably make it $1.7 billion per kilometre," he said. "And these are obviously very rough [figures] because there's zero amount of design done right now."
At 55 kilometres, that's $93.5 billion. But that's just for a car tunnel. If Ford wants to add public transit in the form of a train, Garrod says that's a whole other tunnel that could shoot the cost up to around $130 billion.
Ford says PCs are a party of 'visionaries'
That's estimating that the tunnel would, like the one in Seattle, have four lanes of traffic.
Seattle's tunnel, which houses two two-lane roads on top of each other "is pretty much the biggest tunnel diameter that can be done with a machine right now," Garrod said.
If Ford is imagining a tunnel with as many lanes as the widest areas of the 401, that may be beyond the capabilities of the tunnelling industry at this point, Garrod says. Ford has not said he would like both roadways to be equal in capacity.
But he does say the eye-popping potential price tag could be worth it, because the province's economy is already losing $56 billion every year because of bad traffic. He added the 400 series highways will be at maximum capacity in 10 years.
"That's the difference between ourselves and the other parties. We're visionaries. We're thinking 50 years and 100 years out," Ford said Thursday.
Will the tunnel work?
While Ford justifies the tunnel by citing the cost of traffic to the city, one expert says it's unlikely to have an impact on congestion.
"All the research points to the necessity to curb the demand for highway travel rather than create new highways on the supply side," said Steven Farber, a human geography professor and director of the Mobility Network at the University of Toronto.
As for Ford floating transit as a potential piece of the project, Farber said there is a need for a new east-west transit corridor in that part of the city.
"But we don't start with the tunnel and then decide how we want to fill that tunnel. Let's start with planning."
How long would it take?
Once construction actually begins, Garrod says it would make sense to break it up into 15-kilometre chunks. The chunks would take a $150-million machine working around the clock five years to tunnel, not including the years needed for design work, contract procurement and construction done afterwards, he said.
Spending the money to have multiple machines would make things move faster, he said.
But even when construction gets going, there's no guarantee that it will continue uninterrupted. In the case of Seattle's recent project, a boring machine imported from Japan for the project got stuck.
"It was finished about two and a half years late compared to the advertised expectations, but it did get built," says Mike Lindblom, who covered the project in his more than two decades as the Seattle Times transportation reporter.
That may sound familiar to some in the west end of Toronto, where a boring machine was trapped in 2022.
And while experts say the Seattle project serves as a recent comparison, geographically speaking Lindblom said it's more akin to a tunnelled Gardiner Expressway.
"A big difference between Ontario and Seattle in this context is that no politician really ran for reelection on: 'I'm proposing a tunnel there,'" he added.
The major party leaders running against Ford are not fans of the idea. Both NDP Leader Marit Stiles and Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie have called it a "fantasy," while Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said he wants to see more investment in transit infrastructure instead.
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