How an epic infrastructure fail put commuters in a fury and brought the city to a halt
UNFORGETTABLE SAGAS, SCOOPS AND SCANDALS
from Toronto Life’slong-form archives |
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Dear reader, Soon after Doug Ford announced his half-baked scheme to build a tunnel under the 401, Redditors got to work. One user shared a crudely photoshopped image of the premier’s mug pasted over Lana Del Rey’s face on the cover of her most recent album. The title now read: Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under the 401? The meme was a pretty accurate reflection of the ridicule heaped upon Ford’s plan from nearly every direction. However hare-brained Ford’s proposal, he was attempting to grapple with one of the city’s biggest pain points. As the joke goes: Toronto is an hour away from Toronto. Endless construction, an exploding population and much-delayed transit planning have made it impossible to get around, and no one is taking responsibility. There have been plenty of attempts—most of them misfires—to deal with the sheer volume of people who need to move through the city. “Toronto’s epic infrastructure fail has put commuters in a fury and brought the city to a halt,” wrote Philip Preville in his 2014 piece about the many botched plans to solve the problem. A decade later, it’s clear that we’re not going anywhere fast. For more great long-reads from Toronto Life, subscribe to our print edition here. |
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| —Chris Bilton, features editor |
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How incompetence, pandering and baffling inertia have kept Toronto stuck in traffic |
BY PHILIP PREVILLE | SEPTEMBER 24, 2014 |
Getting around the city, by public transit or by car, has become a perpetual nightmare of sardine-tin crowds, endless queues and construction bottlenecks. Politicians keep sparring over which transportation fix is best. But to voters, who’ve endured a generation-long succession of false starts, bad decisions and political interference, it’s all empty promises. Toronto’s epic infrastructure fail has put commuters in a fury and brought the city to a halt. Here, the most egregious scandals in recent memory—and who’s to blame. |
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