Highways in Canada

[swimmer_spe]

Originally Posted by ericmacm

Cost is absolutely a huge factor, unfortunately. The construction of brand new interchanges these days seems to be coming in at around $150-200M (in ideal conditions like open prairie, areas with challenging terrain would likely cost even more) and the costs of overpasses are highly variable.

Just doing some ballpark estimating, using the TCH in Manitoba as an example, if you were to build a new interchange every 10 km or so (using average interchange spacing on 401 in SW Ontario as an example), you would be building around 14 on the segment of the TCH between Winnipeg and the Ontario border, which would cost around $2.1-2.8B just for the interchanges, not counting overpass grade separations, bypasses, or access removals. The number would grow closer to around $9.2B to include interchanges on the remainder of the TCH in Manitoba if you continued with an approximately 10km spacing.

While something like this is not out of the realm of impossibility, it is a lot of money for what is realistically not a lot of return outside of safety improvements. Interchanges will improve safety and will reduce accidents, especially on a TCH system that sees an ever-increasing amount of truck traffic, but a $9.2B+ spend is a very hard figure to justify by any government.

Despite the costs, however, I do believe that we need to seriously pick up the pace when it comes to work on both twinning and upgrading the TCH network, specifically in its most underdeveloped sections through BC and ON. It is very clear that not having a robust national highway network like the US is a major point of vulnerability.

Calgary to Winnipeg is about 1,300 km. So, that would need about 130 interchanges spaced 10km apart. Lets say that is $200m per. That would be $26 billion. You are seeing the real world effects of building a divided highway cheaply. Time to dig deep and make them limited access.