THE FOUR-OH-ONE - NORTH AMERICA'S BUSIEST HIGHWAY

King’s Highway 401, commonly referred to as Highway 401, and also known by its official name as the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway, or colloquially as the four-oh-one is a controlled accesses highway in the Canadian province of Ontario. It stretches 514 miles from Windsor in the west to the Ontario-Quebec border in the east. The part of the highway that passes through Toronto is North America’s busiest highway and one of the widest. It forms the road transportation backbone of the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, along which over half of Canada’s population resides and is also a Core Route in the National Highway System of Canada. A 2016 analysis stated the annual average daily traffic (AADT) count between Weston Road and Highway 400 in Toronto was nearly 420,000. While a second study estimates that over 500,000 vehicles travel that section on some days. This makes it North America’s busiest highway, surpassing the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles and I-75 in Atlanta. Highway 401 also features North America’s busiest multi-structure bridge at Hogg’s Hollow in Toronto. The four bridge, two for each direction with the collector and express lanes, carried an average of 373,000 vehicles daily in 2006.