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The thing is, when using roads is free, the price drivers pay is in time. If you expand a road to speed traffic up, the road fills up again until the time cost is the same as it was before. The road carries more cars but it does not carry them faster.

But let’s put that really big problem aside. Let’s also put aside the question of our governments’ spending a bunch of money to make motoring easier at the same time as they spend a bunch of money on climate change.

Maybe you remember Chiarelli’s similar announcement last spring about widening the 417 west of Maitland, as far as the interchange with Highway 416. We still don’t know what that will cost — the government wouldn’t say then, because it didn’t want to tip its hand on a project that was going out for bids. Seven months later it still hasn’t been tendered so the price is still a mystery.

Both these widenings have been on the books for years, the result of a mid-2000s study of the 417 before east-west light rail was a twinkle in city hall’s eye. The planners assumed there was no prospect of a major east-west transit upgrade. For improving east-west traffic, as far as they were concerned, the options were to widen the highway or do nothing.

Now we are building a train line that, by 2023, will run directly alongside much of the wider highway. It’s a multibillion-dollar project, which the provincial and federal governments are largely funding. The feds are even underwriting a study about extending the western line all the way to Kanata.