[Mister F]

Originally Posted by vid

The Terry Fox Highway (Nipigon to Thunder Bay) is, slowly but surely, being rebuilt. (It's Michael Gravelle's riding, and twinning that stretch is what he campaigned on in 1995.) It's the only major project I can think of. The Liberal government has started the process of upgrading highway 11/17 from Nipigon to Shabaqua as a grade-separated, twinned highway, but it will likely be 30 years before it takes shape.

And to be totally honest, a lot of people in Thunder Bay don't want Toronto to be ignored. We go there all the time, we build your transit vehicles (so investment in that area means more stability at our second largest private employer), it's just that we have a lot of difficulties up here and often feel that they're shrugged off by the south, mainly with comments like this:



The difference between Simcoe's county roads, and Northern Ontario's trunk highways—and I say this with utmost respect—is that in the south, is a 6 car pileup closes Highway 4, there are alternative routes to take. In Northern Ontario, is a 6 car pileup closes Highway 11/17, the detour is Via the United States and adds over 12 hours to the trip.

An exception needs to be made for this region because our highways are the only highway. We don't have a grid of back roads to fall back on. If our highway gets closed, people get stranded, sometimes for days. There have been many occasions in the past few years (and it seems to be becoming more frequent) where the main highways get washed out and take days or weeks to be repaired. We had to airlift a community to evacuate it last year because the only road leading to it washed out and stranded everyone. Between the communities of Pearl and Nipigon, there is no alternate route to cross this province by road, unless you have a really good off-road vehicle that can take the 45 km long detour through overgrown logging routes.

BTW, the 2 to 150 series highways are our trunk highways. In Northern Ontario, a back road highway is numbered 500- or 600- something. They're basically county roads, but the province has to maintain them because there is no county government up here.

Yes I'm aware that some areas have only one road. It always struck me as a little strange that there's only one road connecting east and west in this country. 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. I'm really not sure what else you could want. 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.

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.