Perhaps the most controversial part of the issue of new roads that Ontario’s conservative progressives want to build is that they would be good for the environment.
If the notion is not calculated immediately, how can a large strip of asphalt be green? – the party has a ready answer. By eliminating bumper-to-bumper traffic, its leaders say, the new infrastructure will lead to less idle pollution.
However, scientific research has shown that not only would new highways not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but even their construction could have a carbon-equivalent impact on a slow-moving vehicle for thousands of years.
With climate change as an accelerating concern, and the province committed to reducing emissions, opponents on the roads say they would take Ontario in the wrong environmental direction by encouraging longer car journeys.
“Doug Ford believes the road to the future should overburden expensive expansion, increase climate pollution, pave farmland and wetlands, and pollute Lake Simcoe,” says Green Party leader Mike Schreiner.
Once in office, Conservative progressives dusted off two highway proposals that had been shelved by the previous government.
The Globe Ontario Electoral Center
One, the 59-mile 413 freeway, stretches across the northwestern part of the Greater Toronto Area. This proposed road would pass through the Greenbelt Protected Area, which stretched from the 401/407 interchange to the west to Highway 400 in Vaughan.
The other major proposal, the 16-mile Bradford Bypass, would connect Highways 400 and 404 to Simcoe County and the York Region.
“Reducing traffic jams on existing roads also means less greenhouse gas emissions from traffic-sick passengers,” said Christine Elliott, who has served as deputy prime minister for the past four years, on her legislative website.
However, Shoshanna Saxe, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Mining Engineering at the University of Toronto, points to the environmental degradation inherent in highway construction. He pointed out the U.S. investigation indicating that the construction of a four-lane highway mile generated approximately 5,500 metric tons of greenhouse gases.
He warned that this figure was more than accurate, saying that it is for a road on the surface and does not take into account additional features such as bridges, interchanges or tunnels, all this would increase the impact. However, extrapolating from this figure, the construction of the 75 kilometers of new road could be expected to produce at least 413,000 tonnes of GHG.
In comparison, slowing down a three-liter engine for an hour produces the equivalent of just over 4 pounds of GHG, according to Natural Resources Canada. Which means a driver would have to stop for about 11,375 years to match the impact of the construction of the two highways.
While there are some advances towards greener highway construction, Professor Saxe said these methods are not widely used and are unlikely to be used for these Ontario projects.
“Everything we build or do will have an environmental impact,” he said, “but building materials are irreducible because of the chemical processes we use to make steel, concrete, and asphalt. greenhouse effect only by making them ”.
The environmental impact of transportation has been receiving increasing attention in recent years around the world. In some jurisdictions, important infrastructure decisions are seen through a lens that includes the health of the planet.
In Austria, which aims to be carbon-neutral by 2040, Agence France-Presse reported in December that the government was canceling eight motorway projects. And in April, U.S. regulators approved a rail merger in part because it would allow trucks to be removed from New England roads.
As for the argument that new roads will benefit the environment by reducing congestion, a Quebec City scholar who studies urban transportation and sustainable development called the idea ridiculous.
Fanny Tremblay-Racicot, an assistant professor at the National School of Public Administration, noted that new roads are invariably filled with new drivers.
“It is very, very sad to see that the government is not better informed by the Ministry of Transport,” he said. “To say that emissions are offset by less traffic only shows how, I don’t know, I’m like, words are missing. It’s hypocritical, it’s absurd, it’s ignorant, it’s crazy. “
A study published in 2012 found that more road capacity produces more pollution, because the promise of easier driving makes more people do it.
“In the long run, capacity-based congestion improvements … can reasonably be expected to increase emissions,” the authors write in the journal Transportation Research.
The Environmental Defense group studied 413 and predicts a massive increase in driving if built. Its report says vehicles using the highway would produce 17.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050.
“Building mega-highways is a very old way of thinking, and we’re actually able to do something better,” said Lana Goldberg, the group’s director of Ontario’s climate program.
“We need to plan for a transition that may not include new mega-highways, which will only increase transportation emissions, but instead we need to build low-emission transportation systems that are accessible to all residents and provide healthy, complete and sustainable communities ”.
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