HOPEFULLY, WHAT WE'VE SEEN happen on the extension of Highway 410 is something that will be seen increasingly elsewhere in Ontario.

Perhaps benefitting from experience gained in the construction of Highway 407, Ontario's Ministry of Transportation opted for concrete instead of hot-mix asphalt for the extension.

Sadly, the same choice hasn't been made elsewhere, including on the latest Highway 10 tender for the widening project through Caledon village, where the bidding has been based on providing an asphalt surface.

Just why, in the last half-century, successive Ontario governments have chosen asphalt over concrete has never been adequately explained, particularly when one considers the fact that most of the U.S. Interstate highways are concrete, as well as the fact that Ontario initially used concrete for the entire length of the Queen Elizabeth Way and many major two-lane highways, among them Highway 10 between Forks of the Credit Road and Chatsworth.

Even Shelburne Council opted for concrete on the then village's main streets in the late 1920s, the work being done by the same firm that was paving Highway 10.

Presumably, the switch to asphalt after the Second World War was based partly on the initial cost and partly on complaints that concrete highways didn't provide as smooth a ride and were harder to patch.

However, neither consideration ought to apply under current circumstances.

With crude oil now costing more than $120 a barrel, the cost of asphalt has soared, albeit not to the extent of gasoline and diesel oil. In a survey updated only last week, the Massachusetts Highway Department said the average cost of liquid asphalt in March and April was $420.75 a ton, up from $396.50 a year earlier and $139.77 in the same period of 1998, when gasoline there cost just 81 cents a U.S. gallon (about 21.5 cents a litre).

Clearly, although the cost of liquid asphalt has risen more slowly than that of gasoline and diesel oil, it has tripled in the last decade and will undoubtedly go a lot higher if the price of crude oil rises, as predicted, to $150 a barrel by mid-summer.

However, initial cost is far from the only consideration.

Concrete's bad reputation among lovers of silk-smooth driving was due in large part to poor roadbeds that couldn't withstand severe frosts, as well as to the type of concrete used and surface characteristics that led to unexpected deterioration from road salting.

No doubt benefiting from lessons learned in the United States, Ontario contractors finally achieved success in the 1970s during the final stages of the massive Toronto Bypass project, when "textured" reinforced concrete was used on part of Highway 427.

Even today, after more than three decades of heavy pounding by huge volumes of traffic, that roadway is still reasonably smooth, and has been the scene of some highly successful maintenance, with new concrete instead of asphalt being used for patching.

More recently, similar success has been achieved on Highway 407, with concrete being used on the most heavily travelled portions of the toll road.

After 407 opened, the Province in 2001 decided to do something it had never done before, tendering an "alternate bid" (concrete or asphalt) contract for a section of Highway 417 east of Ottawa. The bids were analyzed based not just on the initial cost of construction but on a 50-year life cycle cost. Not surprisingly, Oakville based Dufferin Construction won with a $23.6- million bid based on using concrete, and the paving was done over the next two construction seasons.

Clearly, if concrete was seen as cheaper in the long run back in 2001 when liquid asphalt cost less than US$200 a ton, it ought to be far more competitive in today's marketplace.

However, even if concrete paving can be both cost-competitive and reasonably smooth, there's one other consideration that should firmly tilt the scale in favour of concrete: product sourcing.

As everyone surely knows, Ontario refineries import virtually all their crude oil from Western Canada, since wells in Southwestern Ontario produce a relative trickle of the product.

In contrast, concrete's ingredients (mainly Portland cement) can be found in abundance in southern Ontario, with St. Marys the scene of the largest of several cement plants (and Orangeville once having one that used marl beds near Caledon Lake).

As we see it, the choice for the McGuinty government should be as easy as the one made by earlier governments in opting for nuclear power plants that used uranium found in abundance in Northern and Eastern Ontario rather than coal-fired plants with fuel that must be brought in from Alberta and Appalachia.

Clearly, with a recession beckoning or already here, there are a lot of economic benefits to be gained from the switch to concrete, and not just for major projects like the extension of Highway 400 to Sudbury.

In fact, we think there would be every good reason for the Province to encourage counties, regions and local municipalities to make concrete the norm for new construction, even to the point of requiring it in new subdivisions.

Although the only Dufferin subdivision with concrete streets - on Mono's Purple Hill - might be seen as proof of its impracticality because of the roughness, current technologies ought to be capable of creating reasonably smooth concrete surfaces.

And even if that's not the case, we suspect the Purple Hill streets' bumpiness keeps their traffic down to reasonable speeds!