Future
See also: Ontario Highway 417With all route planning studies now completed on Highways 11 and 69/400, in the latter half of the 2000s the Ministry of Transportation's planning branch began undertaking more active preparations for the eventual conversion of Highway 17 to freeway. Although no comprehensive conversion plan is currently in place, planning and construction projects are now underway at a number of locations along the highway.
Sault Ste. Marie MPP David Orazietti has spearheaded a petition to have the entire highway four-laned from Arnprior to Sault Ste. Marie, similar to the campaign previously undertaken by his caucus colleague Rick Bartolucci regarding the extension of Highway 400. Cheryl Gallant, the federal Member of Parliament for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, has also advocated the four-laning of the highway through the Ottawa Valley toward North Bay, and ultimately the entire length of the highway throughout Northern Ontario.
A 2009 study commissioned by the forestry trade magazine The Working Forest, titled "A Vision for Ontario’s Trans Canada Highway, North Bay to the Manitoba Border", determined that it would cost the Ontario government $600 million per year over 25 years to convert the entire length of both Highway 17 and Highway 11 to freeway, suggesting that a comprehensive plan would be affordable and achievable if the provincial and federal governments could reach a cost-sharing agreement.
Read more about this topic: Ontario Highway 17
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)
“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the future on?
He seems to say the reason why so much
Should come to nothing must be fairly faced.....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I imagine, on the benches of an assembly, the most intrepid of thinkers, a brilliant mind, one of those men who, when they ascend the tribune, feel it beneath them like the tripod of the oracle, suddenly grow in stature and become colossal, surpass by a head the massive appearances that mask reality, and see clearly the future over the high, frowning wall of the present.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)