Quote:
Originally Posted by sonysnob
New video of Hwy 417 through Kanata shot in June. Hwy 417 was being widened from four to six and eight lanes when this video was shot. Construction is to be completed next year.
• Video Link |
What a horrific waste of money.
8 lanes to/from Kanata, plus a ninth in the eastbound direction as a bus lane (the westbound bus lane - effectively a tenth lane - doubles in places as a shoulder, but the eastbound direction has a shoulder all the way). It's absurd to have that kind of capacity given that east of Hwy 416 the Queensway still only has 3 lanes per direction and won't ever get more than 4. So we get 4 lanes from Kanata plus 2 from Hwy 416 closing down onto 3 and eventually 4 lanes into downtown Ottawa. All this lane capacity for a suburb of barely 100k people. And Lord only knows why Hwy 416 has 2 lanes heading around most of the interchange towards Kanata - that was some pretty empty road 0:30-1:00.
As if to compound the waste, at some point a bus transitway is supposed to be built on the north side of the Queensway. That's two more lanes and two more shoulders of asphalt... "asphalt planet" indeed. God forbid that the City and the Ministry do some real planning by having built the transitway while dropping 2-4 lanes of what became the 8-10 lanes of the Queensway.
The Ministry of Transport even managed to find money to widen the bridges over the CN Beachburg subdivision (1:19) but could they find the money to save the railway line itself from abandonment? Well of course not. The rather misnamed Ministry of Transport only does cars and trucks, after all. Having let both the CP Chalk River/North Bay (after building another bridge over it in Arnprior, of course) and CN Beachburg subdivisions in the Ottawa Valley fall to ATVs and snowmobiles, all this new road built by the MoTO will only see an increase in truck traffic and further pressure to extend Hwy 417 along Hwy 17.
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