Dear reader,
Soon after Doug Ford announced his half-baked scheme to build a tunnel under the 401, Redditors got to work. One user shared a crudely photoshopped image of the premier’s mug pasted over Lana Del Rey’s face on the cover of her most recent album. The title now read: Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under the 401? The meme was a pretty accurate reflection of the ridicule heaped upon Ford’s plan from nearly every direction.
However hare-brained Ford’s proposal, he was attempting to grapple with one of the city’s biggest pain points. As the joke goes: Toronto is an hour away from Toronto. Endless construction, an exploding population and much-delayed transit planning have made it impossible to get around, and no one is taking responsibility.
There have been plenty of attempts—most of them misfires—to deal with the sheer volume of people who need to move through the city. “Toronto’s epic infrastructure fail has put commuters in a fury and brought the city to a halt,” wrote Philip Preville in his 2014 piece about the many botched plans to solve the problem. A decade later, it’s clear that we’re not going anywhere fast.
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