This is something I complained about a year ago. These people who think they are doing something good by saying they are protecting Lake Simcoe and they want to stop the Bradford Bypass and block Highway 413 are a bunch of amateurs running in circles. Judging by their ill-thoughtout news release in Barrie Today recently, I truly wish they had professional help. Their movement desperately needs focus.
And Barrie Today is hardly helping them by running the group’s news release without professional editing. How many of the readers of Barrie Today would immediately know that construction just north of Bradford on Yonge Street is probably one of the bridges for the Bradford Bypass? If a person paid attention to all the bridge work and road widening related to Highway 400 over the last ten years, they would know that is all related to the growing traffic.
It might frustrate some NIMBY’s (Not In My Back Yard) that they cannot prevent something for the common good. Highways 400 and 404 in Ontario has been developed over the past 70 years to improve access to Ontario’s summer and winter playgrounds in the lakes-regions of Central Ontario. The cottagers, tourists and skiers have created an economic bonanza for Ontario. The Bradford Bypass is critical to splitting the streams of traffic, both commercial and tourist and Ontario residents. Those roads should not only be linked through the Town of Newmarket.
If you want to complain about the very idea of the proposed Highway 413, I am with you 100 per cent. This plan was discarded by the last liberal government of Ontario for very good reason. The highway was not needed. The ministry of transportation is always busy looking at possible solutions to traffic needs. In Ontario and in most sensible jurisdictions, we do not build highways to satisfy the greed of our developer friends. Most of these builders are upstanding citizens and would not dream of getting insider information of where highways are going to be built.
Judging by the amount of time it takes to plan, design, get approvals and funds for a major highway project, combined with the mysteries of municipal approvals, you could be sure that if you were a young person when you got the inside information, you would be a very old person before profiting.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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