Cost of Ford’s Highway 401 tunnel dream would be ‘astronomical,’ experts say
Global News
The potential cost of a tunnelled expressway below Highway 401 remains unclear, but comparable examples suggest it could be tens of billions of dollars.
Doug Ford’s tunnelled highway plan will likely cost tens of billions of dollars and be hugely complicated, experts and advocates say.
On Wednesday morning, Ford unveiled his plan to commission a thus-far-uncosted feasibility study to work out how to tunnel a new expressway beneath the gridlocked lanes of Highway 401, possibly stretching from Mississauga and Brampton in the west to Markham and Scarborough in the east.
The premier said the feasibility study would predict the cost and potential scope the scale of the project — but insisted that this was a plan he would push ahead, whatever its results.
That desire to build a project that hasn’t been studied yet is a major worry for Jay Goldberg, the Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
“My biggest concern with what we’ve heard about so far is that Premier Ford says there’s going to be a feasibility study, but that he’s going to get this project done essentially regardless of the feasibility study,” Goldberg said. “So, that’s the most concerning aspect for taxpayers.”
The potential cost of the tunnelled project remains an open question.
The government said it won’t publish the cost of the feasibility study until a contract has been awarded to explore the possibility of the route, while the premier said that the study would dictate the cost of the overall project.
There are few directly comparable projects to help estimate the cost. The Big Dig in Boston, for example, cost around $8 billion for a roughly 2.5-kilometre tunnel, while Washington State spent $2.15 billion on 3.2 kilometres of tunnelled highway in Seattle.
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