How old will you be…
…when Highway 69 becomes Highway 400?
The drive to Toronto can be long and boring. Next time you travel on Highway 69, surprise your fellow travelers with these interesting facts.
The cost of four-laning Highway 69 will be around $6.5 million per kilometer. But in Saskatchewan, one kilometre would cost between $1 million and $1.5 million. So, why do you think it is more expensive to build a road in northern Ontario? The answer is: the landscape. Engineers must blast through tons of rock and build bridges across rivers and streams. These ‘extras’ cost a lot of money.
Eventually, the whole 152 kilometre stretch of highway connecting Sudbury to Parry Sound will be four-lanes. The road will include 20 interchanges, 103 bridges, 14 river crossings and 50 stream crossings.
To build the highway, a total of 37 million cubic metres of rock, earth and gravel will have to be moved. Imagine filling Toronto’s Rogers Centre (Skydome) 22 times, from ground-level up to the top of its retractable roof. That’s how much material there will be!
The total cost of the project will be more than $1.2 billion, and the final stretch (roughly halfway between Sudbury and Parry Sound) will be completed in 2017. That is when Highway 69 will be fully renumbered as Highway 400, and who knows, maybe you’ll have your driver’s license by then.
Claire Kamber has three volunteer jobs and writes fiction for kids. Before moving to Sudbury in 2005, she worked as an ESL teacher in Brisbane, Australia.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
