Highway 401, also known as the McDonald-Cartier Freeway as it passes through metropolitan Toronto, is an extremely long and high-capacity paved highway extending from Windsor, Ontario (immediately across the border from Detroit) to the Ontario-Quebec border, becoming some Quebecois-named road before terminating in Montreal.
What’s so special about this particular highway, and why write about it? Well, it’s one of widest highways in the world, swelling up from a simple 2 lane rural road to an 18-lane, 4-section superhighway. It’s also notorious for numerous 50-car-plus pileups, due to its high capacity and speed. In fact, it’s become so bad on particular stretches of the highway that some have considered petitioning and requesting the provincial government to raise the speed limit from 100 km/h to 110-120 km/h to allow people to go faster. Average number of cars travelling throughout the 401: 430,000. During summertime? almost 500,000. That’s alot of cars =)
Sometimes, I feel that life can be that highway. It’s so wide, so busy, things travelling through it so quickly it’s impossible to grasp the sheer size and volume of every day, every minute. It’s impossible to savour. But in a way, it’s up to us to take the opportunity to try and catch whatever we can, and make the best out of it.
Maybe we don’t have 18 opportunities coming at us all at once, but everyone gets more chances than they deserve. What we do for them…well, that’s a different story.
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