Corporate chauffeur service across Vaughan

The Metropolitan Centre at Highway 7 and Jane is the newest piece and behaves like a small downtown: office towers, a subway terminus, and the first genuine curbside congestion the city has had. Bookings there are timed the way downtown Toronto bookings are, with a specific door rather than an intersection.

Concord, east of the 400, is the working half — service roads, unmarked units and a great many head offices that do not look like head offices from the street. Woodbridge sits west toward the 427 and is largely residential with a commercial spine along Highway 7. Kleinburg, further north, is a village that happens to sit inside a city, and the drive out to it is a genuinely different trip.

Those four places share a municipality and almost nothing else. A pickup in Kleinburg and a pickup at the Metropolitan Centre are twenty minutes and one entire road network apart.

The rapidway along Highway 7 put dedicated transit lanes down the centre of the road and took a lot of left turns away with them. The result is that being on the wrong side of Highway 7 is not a matter of crossing — it is a matter of driving on to the next permitted turn and coming back, which can add several minutes to a pickup that is visually forty metres away.

It is the one local detail worth knowing when you book. Telling us which side of Highway 7 the entrance is on, or naming the plaza rather than the cross-street, is worth more here than anywhere else in the region.

Northbound and southbound movement is the easy part. Highway 400 runs straight down to the 401, the 427 extension has made the western half of the city considerably quicker to reach, and the 407 crosses the top for anyone heading east toward Markham.

Pearson is the practical airport for the whole city, and from Woodbridge in particular it is close. Departures leaving Vaughan in the morning are the ones that need care: the 400 southbound between six and nine is a queue, and a pickup planned on off-peak numbers will miss a check-in cut-off.

Downtown trips are the reverse problem. Coming into the core from Vaughan at the same hour, most passengers who need to be there for a fixed time either leave earlier than feels reasonable or book the day by the hour so the return is not a second gamble.

Firms with offices along the Highway 7 corridor generally hold a corporate account rather than booking trip by trip, since the same three or four journeys repeat every week.