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On the campaign trail, Ford boasted of building the Bradford Bypass, vowed to deliver Highway 413, and dreamed of digging a mega-tunnel under the 401. All these projects were premised on promises of cutting commuting times.

But it’s not just about bypassing traffic jams. He’s also using shortcuts to bypass the political rules of the road for taxpayer transparency.

Announcing preliminary contracts to build Highway 413, the usually voluble premier took a vow of silence about what it will cost. He’ll “Get it Done” — to borrow his favourite campaign slogan — but it’s none of our business how much it costs.

Ford is a fast-talker about expressways, but he’ll slow-walk the numbers. The populist politician who lambastes his rivals for overspending now wants a blank cheque.

The premier is all about building, not budgeting. Instead, Ford has found a winning formula — with a crucial corollary:

If you build it, they will come.

But if you overbuild — and overspend — they will come after you.

Better to bury the numbers deep under the roadbed where no one can look them up later and catch you out.

That’s the playbook followed by Ford and his faithful cabinet ministers. No numbers, just two words:

Trust us.

It’s a road map to overruns, misrule and misappropriation. It’s also the wrong takeaway from recent boondoggles.

Bad enough when the Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit line goes into overtime and over budget. While many in the media and the opposition will point accusing fingers over delays, the point is to learn from mistakes — not pretend they didn’t happen by preventing anyone from finding out.

The premier is acting as if he can build as he pleases in his own time on his own dime. But the funding for these highways belongs to the people, not the politicians.

The bottom line is that every instance of public spending — or misspending — is made better by transparency to ensure probity with public money. Democratic government depends on disclosure.

All that said — and unsaid by Ford — there’s more to the numbers than mere money expended and completion timelines. What about the political premise that these new roadways will reduce travel time?

Building mass transit achieves that goal for riders. But will Ford’s favourite new roadways truly shorten commuter time for motorists?

The premier repeated his claim the other day that the 52-kilometre highway from Highway 401 in Mississauga to Highway 400 in Vaughan “will shorten travel times up to 30 minutes per trip.”

In fact, one study for the previous Liberal government calculated the time savings at a minute or less. We’ll know the true number one day in future, but there’s good reason to doubt the calculations even before construction gets underway.

Commuters don’t like to hear this, but past experience suggests that the more roads you build in a congested area, the more cars will quickly converge on those highways to fill them up. It’s called the “theory of induced demand,” but it’s just a fancy way of saying that free roadways lead to free-for-alls.

Building the Bradford Bypass and Highway 413 may just encourage congestion, rather than reducing it. Perhaps that sounds counterintuitive, but it’s not hard to understand — on one level Ford gets it, even if he doesn’t level with voters.

If you build more free roads without making people pay, they will use their cars more. If you charge tolls, as on Highway 407, they will use it as little as possible to pay as little as they can get away with.

That’s human nature, and little different from the price of electricity — we charge more in peak time and less in off-peak hours to encourage people to ration the use of hydro and thus reduce the need to build more capacity. If we made electricity free, it would “induce” — or increase — consumer demand and cause brownouts, the equivalent of congestion.

That’s why it’s so interesting and disappointing to see the New Democratic Party propose an end to road tolls on the 407, as if that would magically take pressure off the 401 — when in fact it would just lead to traffic jams on both routes. As Ford himself has acknowledged, when shooting down the NDP’s idea, the recent opening up of more toll-free lanes on the provincially owned eastern stretch of Highway 407 resulted in recurring traffic jams in the aftermath, leaving us no further ahead (and the provincial treasurer poorer).

Ford gets it, but he’s just giving commuters more of what they want. And after watching Ford win all five Brampton seats in the last election, the NDP is also telling voters what they want to hear.

That’s the hidden price of populist politics. Too bad the premier won’t level with us — either on the upfront construction costs, or future commuting times.