Falls council calls for fully functional Hwy. 405
Years of no QEW Toronto-bound access has gone on too long
City council is asking Niagara Region and the province to support a fully functional Highway 405.
Local politicians endorsed the resolution, brought forward by Coun. Victor Pietrangelo during this week’s meeting.
“I think that the time is now to really start the process,” said Pietrangelo.
Highway 405 connects the Queen Elizabeth Way near St. Catharines with the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge.
“I still believe that from a city standpoint, it makes so much sense for us to get all of those commercial vehicles off of our roads, especially the ones that are headed out to the 405 and Stanley (Avenue) and have to cross our city every single time because they have no access to the Queen Elizabeth Way,” said Pietrangelo, adding Mountain Road is one of the streets they would be coming down.
“No matter how slow they’re going, they make a lot of noise. To have the 405 fully functional so that you can catch it no matter which direction you’re going in, in 20 years time we’ll be wondering why we never did it sooner.”
He said if motorists are headed northbound on the QEW and pass Mountain Road, they should be able to go off onto the 405.
“If you’re coming from the 405 and you’re headed westbound, you should be able to access the Queen Elizabeth Way south and you can’t do that right now, it’s not fully functional. If you’re coming down the 405 from the bridge, westbound, you have to go north into St. Catharines. If you then want to turn around at Glendale Avenue, you can. The whole intersection itself is not fully functional yet.”
Mayor Jim Diodati said Ministry of Transportation officials recently attended a Niagara Region public works meeting where he brought this topic up.
“We’re talking about the redesign of Glendale interchange and they’re talking about this new concept, the double-diamond concept, and they’re trying to figure out the best configuration,” he said.
“I said one of the problems is it’s not a fully functional 405, so in other words if you come from Queenston-Lewiston Bridge and you want to go toward Fort Erie, you have to cut through the city, or you go to Glendale, you get off, you do the loop, you ask someone for directions and you come back the other way. It’s ridiculous and conversely coming the other way you can’t get onto it without cutting through the city.”
Diodati said the Region’s solution is to use Mewburn Road and connect with Line 6.
He said he talked to ministry officials about the idea of a fully functional 405 where motorists, including large commercial vehicles and transport trucks, wouldn’t have to come through the city.
“They made note of that, but I think an official resolution from this council to the Region and the ministry would probably be a good idea.”
Pietrangelo said he wouldn’t support using Line 6 and Mewburn Road as an access way from the 405 up to Mountain Road and then over to the QEW.
“Anyone that goes along that stretch will tell you that the road is quite narrow at that point — to think that you’re going to get large trucks or even a heavy amount of vehicles up and down that road, you’d really have to cut into the escarpment, you’d really be doing some damage there,” he said.
“I really don’t think the people on there would appreciate the traffic, either. We have highways, we need to use our highways to the best of their abilities and right now we’re not doing that.”