City Of Hamilton’s Council Tries To Revive Mid-Pen Highway – ‘This Is Not An April Fools Joke’

A Post from CATCH, also known as the ever relentless watchdog group, Citizens at City Hall in neighbouring Hamilton, Ontario

(Niagara At Large is posting the following piece from the Hamilton online site CATCH because there are still strains of interest, even in this 21^st century as some look for more earthly favourable transportation alternatives, to run a multi-lane highway from the car and truck congested GTA, through Hamilton and Niagara, above the Niagara Escarpment, where this Robert Moses 1950s auto track would cut through some of what is left of the best crop and livestock lands in southern Ontario.

Niagara’s regional council is going to Queen’s Park this spring, around what it calls ‘Niagara Week’, to promote a movement forward on what is calls a transportation “corridor” which could mean rail or some other transporation mode, or could be a euphemism for a highway for the middle half of the 21^st century for all we know – even as the soaring price of gasoline and diesel fuel might quite likely make other modes of transportation look like a free ride, for all we know.

Now here is the following piece by CATCH and let me repeat, CATCH is  a great site that is all about grassroots democracy and telling what the mainstream media, including that all-mighty Hamilton Spectator newspaper is not all that ready to tell, and Niagara At Large encourages you to visit Catch regularly.)

A mid-pennisula highway would cut a swath above the Niagara Escarpment, through numerous kilometres of croplands and wetland, watershed and other natural areas to drive ever more cars and trucks back and forth from the U.S. to the GTA. Is it worth it? How much sense does another high-cost highway make by the time it might open, in the middle of the 21st century.

Hamilton councillors and the senior city staff are continuing to lobby for a mid-peninsula highway to the aerotropolis despite an exhaustive provincial study that concluded three years ago that there is no need for the controversial project. Provincial officials who explained the recommendations of the Niagara to GTA study to council last month were accused of pushing a “political” decision and their responses dismissed as “hogwash” by both Brad Clark and Terry Whitehead.

The eight-year study re-examined earlier proposals for a new expressway between Ft Erie and the 407, and is calling for primary emphasis on transit and the operational improvement of existing roads followed by widening of portions of the QEW and 403 to establish high-occupancy vehicle lanes. It also recommends a new Ft Erie to Welland highway connecting to the 406, and recommends future strategic study of a possible highway across Flamborough.

Clark accused the authors of the study of allowing politics to guide their decisions. He contended that the previous Conservative government that he was part of and which originally proposed the mid-pen had it right, and was appropriately responding to US plans for a NAFTA highway from Mexico to Canada.

“Now another minister stuck his nose in and changed the perception, and because people were complaining about it, now we’re going to put a couple of lanes on the QEW and expect it to take all of that trade that’s coming and increasing exponentially each year,” he declared. “Every commission and board in New York State was adamant in the studies that we needed another highway in Canada to deal with those highways coming up through the States, because it’s a complete bottleneck, and this response that you’re now having to feed us from this government is two lanes instead of the new highway which is what every governor right down to Mexico agreed with.”

Whitehead demanded compensation from the province for excess traffic on city roads such as Garth Street and the Red Hill Valley Parkway, and speculated that “faulty information” must have been used to conclude that a mid-peninsula highway is not needed.

 “One of the assumptions we built the Lincoln Alexander Parkway and the Red Hill Expressway on was that we wouldn’t get a lot of cut through traffic – hogwash,” declared the west mountain councillor. “Those assumptions were way out of whack. We’re getting a lot of cut through traffic that are not regional or city, and we pay the maintenance of those roadways, not the province of Ontario.”

Provincial funding covered somewhat more than half the costs of the valley expressway and the majority of the earlier-opened Linc. Opponents of the Red Hill road repeatedly warned that the two city-owned expressways would create a shortcut between the 403 and the QEW.

City manager Chris Murray joined in the attacks on the provincial study and asked for updating of the 2005 goods movement study, and approval of staff meetings begun last December with Niagara, Peel, Kitchener-Waterloo and Halton to push for modifications to the provincial decisions, or to ensure the mid-pen is approved when planning takes place for growth to 2041 and beyond.

“I can tell you right now the answers on the table transportation wise by no means, as we heard, meet all the needs of 2031, let alone 2041,” Murray stated. “And I think what’s really important to send a signal to the marketplace is that we need to get this sorted out so that there’s some certainty as to how the planning is going to be over the next few decades.”

He also questioned the feasibility of provincial plans to widen the QEW between the Red Hill Parkway and the Freeman interchange in Burlington, arguing that the Parkway’s connection to the QEW “is not your conventional interchange” and took “a lot of modeling, a lot of design” to sort out. 

“I can tell you it works today, barely,” he stated. “And to do anything to that interchange, you know, we want to watch that very carefully to see how much it does I’d be very curious to see how well it works, because it was difficult to get it to work for today.”

Council directed staff to “co-ordinate a meeting with city representatives from Niagara and area municipalities and the New York State Transport Commissioner to discuss the multi-regional transportation needs”.

CATCH (Citizens at City Hall) updates use transcripts and/or public documents to highlight information about Hamilton civic affairs that is not generally available in the mass media. Detailed reports of City Hall meetings can be reviewed at hamiltoncatch.org. You can receive all CATCH free updates by sending an email to http://hamiltoncatch.org/newsletter/?p=subscribe. Sharing links are available on the hamiltoncatch.org.

This post was featured on NAL with the permission of CATCH

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