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Originally Posted by vid
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.
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Well regional roads aren't paid for by the province, they're paid for through municipal property taxes. Many of them were downloaded by the province in the 90s with no way to pay for them, something northern Ontario didn't have to deal with. Kind of goes against the narrative that the south gets all the attention.
When you have a region with five times the highway km with 6% of the population, it just goes to show how much one region subsidizes the other. It's been argued that roads in the GTHA
pay for themselves while in the rest of the province roads are subsidized. The details of that study can be debated (it doesn't take into account costs like pollution, congestion, etc.), but the point is that building so many roads for so few people is a large burden on the province's highway budget.
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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.
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Twinned highways are unnecessary where there are only 2000 cars per day. And when there are 1000 km or more of Highway 17 alone with those kinds of volumes, twinning the whole stretch through difficult terrain would be a colossal waste of money. Yes, obviously there are deaths. That's a criticism of driving in general, which is the most dangerous way to travel by far. Australia doesn't have twinned highways across the outback, Russia doesn't have them across Siberia, New Zealand doesn't have them across the south island, and the Scandinavian countries and Scotland don't have them into their northern reaches either. A twinned highway across a region like northern Ontario doesn't exist anywhere in the world that I can think of.
Twinning remote, lightly travelled highways in the name of safety is like killing a fly with a sledgehammer: it's excessive and ineffective. Hint: the countries I mentioned above don't rely on roads to travel nearly as much as we do, they rely much more on safer modes of transportation. They're also more efficient with highway upgrades, like using cheaper 1+2 setups.
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Originally Posted by vid
But I can't really buy the concern from Southern Ontario that the North "will struggle" on its own. Ontario and Manitoba fought over us because of our resources, and it isn't much different today, except Manitoba is out of the picture. If we cost that much to be a part of Ontario, why does Ontario not want us to leave? Altruism?
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Well, it would struggle on its own. Just look at how much infrastructure there is compared to the population to support it. Resource wealth is great but no large, advanced economy depends on it primarily. Even in Norway it's only 20% or so of the economy, and the rich petro-countries like Qatar are very small. If the Ring of Fire were fully exploited it would still only account for a small percentage of Ontario's economy. The vast majority of wealth is generated in cities. That's why some of the wealthiest countries in the world are city-states like Singapore and Luxembourg: they have no hinterland to support.
And as for why Ontario doesn't want the north to leave, a lot of people in Toronto do want to create their own province so more of the wealth created in the city would stay there instead of supporting rural and remote areas. The city has been starved of infrastructure money for a generation and only now is it starting to catch up. Which brings me back to the point I've been making all along. The idea that many of you have that the GTA gets all the attention and is a burden on the rest of the province is completely false. Be careful what you wish for.
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Originally Posted by vid
I don't think this federal government cares if goods travel through this region to get to the south, they might as well go through the US as far as they're concerned.
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I think it's a cost-benefit thing. It would cost tens of billions to twin the Trans-Canada across northern Ontario, never mind maintenance costs, and the economic benefits would be nowhere near that.