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Originally Posted by Mister F

The thing is, an exception is already being made for the north. Like I said, it gets 5 times more highway spending per capita than the south.

We have five times the highway kilometres.

We don't have regional roads here. The province provides funding for those directly. If you really want to get an adequate comparison of how much it costs to maintain and upgrade our highways, versus those in the south, you need to merge the MTO's Southern Ontario highways budget with all of the upper-tier municipalities' county roads maintenance budgets.

Regardless, if a PC government is elected, you can be assured that that budget will be slashed by more than 80%. I honestly wouldn't put it past them to entirely cancel the Nipigon River Bridge and all construction work along 11/17, regardless of how far along it might be.

Originally Posted by Mister F

I'm really not sure what else you could want.

We're getting what we want right now, it just takes time. The government's timelines of 30+ years to upgrade the expressway through Thunder Bay to a proper urban freeway is, however, unacceptable when that project was supposed to be completed in 1999.

Fortunately, we're not London. Their highways situation is even worse.

Originally Posted by Mister F

By the way, twinning a highway doesn't solve the issue of no alternative routes. Freeways in southern Ontario get closed down fairly often in both directions when there's a bad snowstorm. Roads are inherently unreliable, making them bigger doesn't change that.

Twinned highways don't have regular head-on collisions causing death. Twinned highways have space to pass at all times, not just intermittently. Twinned highways can have higher speed limits. No highways in Northern Ontario currently have speed limits above 90km/h, but traffic travels at over 120km/h at most times. It's dangerous. A twinned highway would be safer, and an accident or washout wouldn't paralyze the region as easily as it currently does.

Originally Posted by Mister F

Newfoundland has the same issue - no alternatives to the Trans-Canada...and no Toronto to blame. I'm just responding to the belief that Toronto gets all the attention when the facts show otherwise, at least in terms of transportation.

That doesn't change the fact that our highways, compared to those in Manitoba and Minnesota, are unsafe and slow.