Doug Ford's 401 tunnel vision could come with a nearly $100B price tag, expert says

Doug Ford's plan for a tunnel under Highway 401 has gone from a surprise announcement to a full on re-election pledge.

And according to one expert's cost estimate, it could be a near $100-billion idea, which would make it the single-most expensive Ontario election promise in the last 10 years, if not the province's history.

In September, the PC leader, who was then premier, said his government would explore a tunnel for drivers and public transit under the 401, with a feasibility study to follow. On his re-election campaign in February, Ford said, "We're going to get that tunnel built." 

Little is known about the plans for the tunnel aside from the fact that the Ministry of Transportation says it could go from Brampton or Mississauga in the west to Scarborough or Markham in the east — a massive, costly, roughly 55-kilometre long project that some say may not solve Toronto's traffic woes.

The cost of the tunnel would likely exceed $50 billion, according to Brian Garrod, a past president of the Canadian Tunnelling Association who worked on the Channel Tunnel (or chunnel) connecting England with France as well as several major subway projects in Toronto. 

That estimate is based on the 3.2 kilometre, $3.3-billion US State Route 99 Tunnel that was finished in Seattle, Washington in 2019. But the price of the 401 tunnel is likely much higher, given the Seattle tunnel was budgeted in American dollars and constructed more than half a decade ago, Garrod said.

"Since it was finished in 2019, that number should be inflated just to bring it up to today's date. And that would probably make it $1.7 billion per kilometre," he said. "And these are obviously very rough [figures] because there's zero amount of design done right now."

At 55 kilometres, that's $93.5 billion. But that's just for a car tunnel. If Ford wants to add public transit in the form of a train, Garrod says that's a whole other tunnel that could shoot the cost up to around $130 billion. 

That's estimating that the tunnel would, like the one in Seattle, have four lanes of traffic. 

Seattle's tunnel, which houses two two-lane roads on top of each other "is pretty much the biggest tunnel diameter that can be done with a machine right now," Garrod said. 

If Ford is imagining a tunnel with as many lanes as the widest areas of the 401, that may be beyond the capabilities of the tunnelling industry at this point, Garrod says. Ford has not said he would like both roadways to be equal in capacity.

But he does say the eye-popping potential price tag could be worth it, because the province's economy is already losing $56 billion every year because of bad traffic. He added the 400 series highways will be at maximum capacity in 10 years.

"That's the difference between ourselves and the other parties. We're visionaries. We're thinking 50 years and 100 years out," Ford said  Thursday. 

While Ford justifies the tunnel by citing the cost of traffic to the city, one expert says it's unlikely to have an impact on congestion.