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Originally Posted by Truenorth00
This really isn't that that spectacular a fact when you put it in context. The 401 is one of the longest freeways in North America and serves as the major freeway for the urban agglomeration that contains 20% of the country's population. There's nothing comparable in the US. There are several that are long and run thhrough several major cities en route. But none of those cities represent as large a proportion of the national population as Toronto does to Canada. Nor do those interstates have the same importance to local traffic flow in those major cities. The 401 being the busiest Highway in North America sort of speaks to how many fewer highways we have and how important it is to local travel in the GTA.
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It's just more that the MTO decided to go whole hog on a superfreeway through Toronto instead of braiding it with smaller freeways. It was less destructive to do that instead of bulldozing existing neighbourhoods. It's doubly worse since the 407 - which was to take some of the long-distance load off the 401 - is so expensive.
Imagine if LA had half the number of freeways, but the same number of lanes of traffic. You'd funnel the same traffic onto the 405 or whatever was left. So you'd have this 25-lane freeway through LA that had traffic counts of 750,000 vehicles per day or some sort of insane number.
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