For some reason that I haven’t figured out yet, there are a lot of dump trucks on my route to work. I usually take Finch across to Scarborough because it takes about 20 minutes for me to get onto the 401, and that is also the preferred route from these dump trucks. I’ve made an interesting observation however; because the pickup of these dump trucks are so slow, I end up passing them. But, because of the nature of the traffic and traffic lights; I invariably reach the 404 at the same time they do. Sure I can make some ground on the trucks, but I will end up losing my lead either at the Bayview lights, Leslie lights or Don Mills lights. So jostling for position is really a lost cause.

They’ve also finally finished the HOV lanes (2 or more people — lame) on the 404. The HOV lanes on the 404 are the same as the ones on the 403; that is, you can only enter and exit are certain points — which makes sense since merging slows down traffic. I think however, that the designers totally screwed up the Highway 7 HOV integration point. There are so many people exiting at the Highway 7 exit (thank you IBM, ATI, and other tech companies) that traffic is usually backed up in the exit lanes to the 407 exit, sometimes even to John St. or Steeles. The integration of the HOV lane however, starts as the extra lane appears for the exit; which is far too late. You would immediately have to cut through 2 lanes of fast moving traffic and then 2 lanes of stop-and-go traffic if you want to exit on Highway 7, which is almost impossible. So really, you’d have to exit the HOV lanes at Steeles and get stuck in the rush hour traffic. Seeing as how the HOV lanes should be most useful during rush hour, it means that it is actually pretty useless.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: driving, IBM, working