If we get the unnecessary middle-class commuter vehicles off the streets, the drop in congestion will make it easier for those people who do need to drive to do so, and make increasing the road capacity unnecessary. A solution doesn’t have to work for everyone to be useful, and yes, I agree that this one is obviously not practical or useful for someone who works construction, or retail, or in a warehouse or a garage or a restaurant or a lab or a factory or any other job that requires you to be on-site.

I’m not anti-car. I own one. I drive. My physical condition and the location I live in pretty much require it. What I’m against is car trips that increase congestion and pollution without serving a practical purpose, and the constant increase in the number of overpriced lanes of asphalt around Toronto when vital transportation infrastructure in the rest of the province is falling apart. There’s a road a couple of hours’ drive north of here that gets a decent amount of traffic that they’re talking about downgrading to gravel because the municipalities that the province dumped it on can’t afford to repave it—it would literally cost several times the annual budget of the smaller town to repave their section. The railways are decaying to the point that the speed limits on the lines still in service are lower than 30km/h in some areas. The major east-west highway corridors through the province are riddled with potholes and disintegrating asphalt. And Ford wants to waste money on a Toronto commuter tunnel that we should not need. Diminishing the amount of traffic on the 401 would hopefully get him to move on to the next hare-braned wasteful idea. Eliminating all traffic on the 401 is obviously impractical (and not really necessary to avoid this particular piece of idiocy, since the road is already there).