Roads: Gardiner Expressway catch-all, incl. Hybrid Design (2015-onwards)

[facepalming_brooklynite]

I’m still angry that the Wynne government nixed tolling (which was probably the only courageous move John Tory has ever made).

I'm still angry at Andrea Horwath for opposing it too

 

[tstormers]

I'll be happy with that, and it will prove better for Toronto in the long run, just like it has for a bunch of other cities across the world!



If all auto traffic going downtown was going through the Gardiner, then you have a point. The graph that was linked clearly showed that the Gardiner only accounts for around 15% of all auto traffic going downtown!

View attachment 489694

Those delivery trucks, construction vehicles, irregular visitors, etc, that currently use the Gardiner will use the same routes as the rest 85% of the auto traffic or they will use the newly expanded Lakeshore Boulevard.

I'm not sure where you get the 15% of all Downtown auto traffic from.

Also, this study was completed 12 years ago. Not saying it is changing dramatically, but we should argue/discuss some more recent data. A lot changes in a decade, especially the GTA population. Were any studies posted when council voted again to keep moving forward with the hybrid in March of this year?

 

[allengeorge]

Were any studies posted when council voted again to keep moving forward with the hybrid in March of this year?

No.

My take is that this would have shown (no matter how much staff sandbagged it) a massive increase in construction and maintenance costs, both of which have gone vertical after the pandemic.

 

[jmi22]

I don’t think anyone here is arguing that new vehicle infrastructure is needed to serve growth downtown - rather, some of it is needed to service a functional downtown economy.

Believe it or not, a lot of trips cannot be completed by transit or are challenging to complete as transit. Contractors, delivery vans, construction equipment, irregular visitors from far away, etc. all still need vehicle access to the downtown.

Not all that must move downtown is people.

And sure - demolishing the Gardiner wouldn’t eliminate that access - just like, say, closing the lakeshore west GO line wouldn’t make it impossible to take transit downtown, but it would make it a lot more challenging and create a lot more delay for a lot of what are usually very high value trips.

The sky wouldn’t fall if the Gardiner was demolished, but demolishing it would make accessing downtown for a whole whack of demographics, usually very high value demographics for the economy, a lot more challenging.

Just reminding everyone, in case this posters argument suggests otherwise, Toronto will not be tearing out its whole road network and even the most enthusiastic teardown proposals would result in "a whole whack of demographics" just getting off the highway 10 minutes earlier than they currently do.

 

[jmi22]

I'm not sure where you get the 15% of all Downtown auto traffic from.

Also, this study was completed 12 years ago. Not saying it is changing dramatically, but we should argue/discuss some more recent data. A lot changes in a decade, especially the GTA population. Were any studies posted when council voted again to keep moving forward with the hybrid in March of this year?

They got the 15% from the graph they reposted in their post. Just because you do not like the results of a study does not mean you can disregard it.

 

[W. K. Lis]

If the Gardiner Expressway gets torn down, where will all the traffic go? That's the usual excuse given for rebuilding the eastern section of the Gardiner Expressway. What happens elsewhere in the world where an downtown expressway gets torn down?

I-95 Collapse in Philadelphia Didn't Cause a Traffic Disaster, Data Shows​

From link.

When an overpass collapsed, politicians and experts predicted calamity for months. After less than a week, things returned “close to normal.”

On June 11, a section of I-95 collapsed after a truck carrying gasoline flipped and exploded. The driver died in the crash and a section of I-95 was shut down. National news outlets predicted a traffic nightmare that would last for months, disrupt freight traffic, and create noticeable inflation across the country due to a supply chain crisis.

Nothing unites American politicians like a highway in distress. State and federal politicians snapped into action, promising to deploy all available resources to fix the bridge to avoid an economic catastrophe. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called it “a major artery for people and goods, and the closure will have significant impacts on the city and region until construction and recovery are complete.” The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation set up a livestream of the repairs, which Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro says he’s “completely addicted to.”

Almost two weeks after the collapse, the bridge still isn’t fixed—although it will supposedly re-open this weekend in record time—but it is clear that those dire predictions did not come to pass. Initial surges in traffic in the Philadelphia area eased by the end of the week, according to data collected by HERE Technologies and Inrix, two transportation and mapping companies that use vehicle data to measure traffic flows.

Apocalyptic gridlock did not ensnare the Philadelphia area. Truck traffic did not come to a halt. In fact, more people rode the train or took alternate routes and life marched on. A few key highway junctions are a bit slower than they were two weeks ago and traffic in the immediate area of the collapse remains thick. But the extent of the economic damage appears to be limited to things like local business owners not being able to have their lunch delivered to them.

“It appears through a mix of reasons, whether it’s people using public transit, workers working remotely, drivers figuring out better alternate routes, the congestion in the entire region returned to pretty close to normal by the end of this past week,” Kyle Jackson, a senior data analyst at HERE, told Motherboard. “It just took Philadelphia drivers a few days to figure out what those alternate routes were and adjust their commutes accordingly.”

Rather than being some shocking twist, this was an entirely predictable outcome. It is what happens every time a section of a major highway is closed, even unexpectedly due to an emergency. In 2017, a section of I-85 in Atlanta collapsed. The ensuing commute was “not so horrible.” In 2007, a bridge along I-35W in Minneapolis collapsed, but subsequent analyses showed its impact on travel times was minimal. There are many more examples of anticipated “carmageddons” not materializing for planned closures of major highways due to construction, such as the OG “carmageddon” in Los Angeles and the 90,000 cars that “just disappeared” off of the roads daily when the Seattle viaduct was closed.

This is because of the well-established phenomenon known as induced demand. Most commonly, induced demand is invoked when new highways are built and within a few weeks, months, or years become as hopelessly clogged with just as much traffic as there was before. But it also works in reverse, when highways are taken out of commission and there is no noticeable long-term increase in traffic on nearby highways. It is especially true when there are several options to absorb additional traffic.

This is especially the case for I-95 through Philadelphia. And it’s why the national calamity narrative never made sense. This is a local news story that fearmongers suggested was a metaphor for America's crumbling infrastructure and would cause massive nationwide problems. As anyone who has driven along that section of the 95 corridor knows, through traffic does not travel along that particular section of highway. Despite I-95 running from Maine to Florida, the interstate route in the Philadelphia area runs via 295 or the New Jersey Turnpike on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River from Wilmington to Trenton, bypassing Philadelphia altogether. The section featuring the highway collapse, which is called the Delaware Expressway, is mostly a commuter road from North Philadelphia and suburban counties north to downtown. It also serves noted North Philadelphia landmarks like Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Initially, the bridge collapse created “a severe spike in congestion” the Monday after the crash, according to Jackson. The highways in the entire Philadelphia area saw roughly double the normal congestion. But, as the week went on, people adjusted their travel behavior. The regional transportation system, SEPTA, saw a 14 percent increase, or about 1,000 more riders per day, on the three regional lines serving the affected area the Tuesday and Wednesday after the bridge collapse versus a week prior. Other drivers took detours. Some likely worked from home instead. By the end of the week, Jackson said, traffic in the region returned to “close to normal.”

A separate study by Inrix, a traffic management and analysis company, found a handful of “hot spots” along some of the alternate routes where traffic speeds declined by at least 25 percent during rush hours, although that is based on a rolling average for the entire week so doesn’t fully account for the normalization of speeds as the week went on.

While a few hot spots remain like the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the evenings and the local roads in the one-mile vicinity of the collapse, for the most part the traffic hell never materialized, said Bob Pishue, an analyst at Inrix.

“At the end of the day what you see is normal behavior,” Pishue said. “Travel dispersing, people changing modes or working from home or not making trips or consolidating trips. They’re making changes to their travel habits to adjust.”

What is most striking about the emergency response to what ended up being a local inconvenience is the sharp contrast to when something similar happens to anything other than a highway. For example, Amtrak’s second-busiest route, from San Diego to Los Angeles and up to Santa Barbara, has been cut in half, requiring replacement bus service, for more time in the last two years than it has been functioning properly because of erosion near the tracks. This has received virtually no attention from politicians or the media outside of southern California, even though the route normally runs 26 daily trains and has an annual ridership of some three million trips. Boston’s transit system has been plagued by slow speed orders, which is essentially bureaucrats ordering trains to behave as if they’re stuck in traffic, delaying commutes by 20 minutes or more each way for hundreds of thousands of people, again to little attention outside of the Boston area.

Pishue says part of the all-hands-on-deck response to highway collapses is the declaration of a state of emergency which removes red tape to allow urgent repairs to be conducted quickly. Initially, Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s governor, braced locals for the highway to be closed for months. He is now taking a victory lap because it will reopen to traffic this weekend instead.
“So the lesson is why don’t we apply some of these same things to the other projects?” Pishue said. “And I think that’s a completely fair question.”

 

[mistersg1]

Nice bait with “downtown expressway”

On I-95, where this happened was at exit 30, the main downtown exit which I’d argue is accessible via I-676 is at exit 22, this is 8 miles or roughly 13km.

If we use the York/Bay/Yonge ramp on the Gardiner, that’s exit 154, 13km upstream from that point is Kipling…..hardly downtown.

There’s also the situation of many multiple different freeway routes around Philadelphia so a solid closure wouldn’t as be catastrophic as an incident in Etobicoke, in which the current Gardiner is the only realistic way to get deeper into the city other than Queensway or Evans to a point.

In Philadelphia if coming from NJ, Turnpike there’s three other bridges further closer to downtown Philly than where the incident on I-95 happened.

 

[fanoftoronto]

Nice bait with “downtown expressway”

On I-95, where this happened was at exit 30, the main downtown exit which I’d argue is accessible via I-676 is at exit 22, this is 8 miles or roughly 13km.

If we use the York/Bay/Yonge ramp on the Gardiner, that’s exit 154, 13km upstream from that point is Kipling…..hardly downtown.

There’s also the situation of many multiple different freeway routes around Philadelphia so a solid closure wouldn’t as be catastrophic as an incident in Etobicoke, in which the current Gardiner is the only realistic way to get deeper into the city other than Queensway or Evans to a point.

In Philadelphia if coming from NJ, Turnpike there’s three other bridges further closer to downtown Philly than where the incident on I-95 happened.

There have been countless other examples that have been shown in this thread of downtown expressways and highways in many cities that were demolished and no drastic issues arose from doing so. Also, the Gardiner between DVP and Yonge carries far fewer cars than what it carries at Kipling, making your comparison moot. Proximity to downtown doesn't determine traffic, by that logic the 401 and the 427 are suburban highways that shouldn't matter too much to Toronto downtown.

The I-95 collapse is also the newest example that fits the expressway closing argument, resulting in updated traffic and transit habits and not traffic armageddon as some folks would love to expect.

And agreed that closing the Gardiner at Kipling would be bad, but we're only discussing closing the Gardiner between DVP and Yonge. This traffic can easily be accommodated by the expanded Lakeshore Boulevard. What's the downside to this teardown proposal?

 

[afransen]

And agreed that closing the Gardiner at Kipling would be bad, but we're only discussing closing the Gardiner between DVP and Yonge. This traffic can easily be accommodated by the expanded Lakeshore Boulevard. What's the downside to this teardown proposal?

I think the only downside of a partial teardown is the expense of interfacing with the elevated portion at Yonge if we're eventually going to dismantle the Gardiner to say, Dufferin.

 

[zang]

There have been countless other examples that have been shown in this thread of downtown expressways and highways in many cities that were demolished and no drastic issues arose from doing so. Also, the Gardiner between DVP and Yonge carries far fewer cars than what it carries at Kipling, making your comparison moot. Proximity to downtown doesn't determine traffic, by that logic the 401 and the 427 are suburban highways that shouldn't matter too much to Toronto downtown.

The I-95 collapse is also the newest example that fits the expressway closing argument, resulting in updated traffic and transit habits and not traffic armageddon as some folks would love to expect.

And agreed that closing the Gardiner at Kipling would be bad, but we're only discussing closing the Gardiner between DVP and Yonge. This traffic can easily be accommodated by the expanded Lakeshore Boulevard. What's the downside to this teardown proposal?

But, but, think of all the employees of rebar manufacturers who may lose their jobs because they no longer have a part repairing the crumbling elevated gardiner for the next 50 years!

My assumption that the impact to the waterfront would certainly be beneficial to local business, it would open up land for more parks, visually clean up the the area, draw in more tourism and convince more sports/events fans into taking the GO.

Oh and open up millions (billions?) in long term maintenance funding for other projects.

Is there any true negative to anyone other than those entitled drivers who feel they should come above all else?

 

[fanoftoronto]

But, but, think of all the employees of rebar manufacturers who may lose their jobs because they no longer have a part repairing the crumbling elevated gardiner for the next 50 years!

My assumption that the impact to the waterfront would certainly be beneficial to local business, it would open up land for more parks, visually clean up the the area, draw in more tourism and convince more sports/events fans into taking the GO.

Oh and open up millions (billions?) in long term maintenance funding for other projects.

Is there any true negative to anyone other than those entitled drivers who feel they should come above all else?

Adding to this argument the actual traffic that is seen on the Gardiner between Yonge and DVP. This was highlighted in the previous page by @rbt. The peak AM traffic is 4500 cars (5400 occupants at 1.2 per car) coming into DT. This is nothing compared to 20,000 to 25,000 each by the 2 sides of Line 1, Line 2, or the currently under construction Ontario Line.

Single occupancy cars driving on massive, complicated, expensive, and frankly unsafe elevated highways is one of the most inefficient method of moving people into downtown Toronto.

 

[just east of the creek]

After spending another couple of weeks in the Montreal area on a work related visit, Montreal once again reinforces the value of a network of connected bike lanes of varying separations, light rail (as much of it that has opened as it has), rubber tired subways, the beauty of a good smoked meat sandwich, an excellent corner boulangerie, and the Autoroute Ville-Marie.....At the risk of re-hashing old well-worn arguments, the thought of progressively using cut and cover to bury the Gardiner in sections beginning from the Don and working west to Exhibition strongly appeals. And if the $ were there, I would take the Gardiner under the Don as well. None of this will solve traffic issues, they are what they are (Increasing populations = increasing transit requirements), but you put out of site a terrible blunder and a divisive structure of no particular architectural merit, you gain public space to do with as you see fit (transit, parkland, housing.....even a road), and you serve the publics quest for personal motorized wheeled transport of some type with decent access to the area serviced by the G, and the need to service the public and industry located in the Gardiners service area as well. The Gardiner is rarely an expressway any more, will be less so in the future, and does not need to be redesigned as one. I understand there could be some issue with previously buried streetcar links to Union, but I think that is eminently solvable by surfacing most of that route, and separating it from vehicle traffic (which should just be an automatic requirement for all streetcar lines in Toronto new or old. Ride the opened portion of the REM in Montreal, squint a little bit and imagine Crosstown or Finch West or Spadina or.......but perhaps I digress into the realm of fantasy,)

 

[reinventingthewheel]

I think the only downside of a partial teardown is the expense of interfacing with the elevated portion at Yonge if we're eventually going to dismantle the Gardiner to say, Dufferin.

I haven’t driven through this section much recently and hard to rely on 2 year old google street views to remind me – but humour me for a moment.

If I correctly understand the existing configuration, I can picture this phase of Gardiner removal as follows:

• The eastbound exit into Harbour St, which feeds to York-Bay-Yonge, is maintained and *theoretically* shouldn’t face additional traffic
• Since the Bay St entrance to eastbound Gardiner will be removed, I would also remove the existing Bay-Yonge stretch of the eastbound exit to Lakeshore Blvd E and Jarvis. This exit can begin later since it doesn’t need to navigate around that on-ramp
• At some point between the York-Bay-Yonge exit and Yonge St the eastbound Gardiner lanes reduce from 3 to 2
• Following Yonge St, we construct a two lane descent of all (2) eastbound lanes to join Lakeshore Blvd E, before Jarvis
• Westbound entrance from York St to Gardiner remains as two lanes instead of squeezing to one inside the on-ramp and is the beginning of the Gardiner westbound (don’t think widening of the ramp is needed to hold two lanes right up to the top)
• The terminus of DVP at Lakeshore Blvd E could either feed into a widened intersection with reconfigured signalling or the bridges connecting Gardiner and DVP are maintained and reconstructed with a slope down to join Lakeshore Blvd E
  • Not much room to work with here next to Don River so some kind of elevated slip lane seems warranted here
  • This part isn’t as much of a concern to me since it would be a more permanent fixture than the interface to the Gardiner on the west side

How any of this is done iteratively while still supporting any throughput traffic? I don’t know, these are just some ideas I had to illustrate that there might not be that much *temporary* structures necessary. Temporary meaning sections that will later be destructed with additional Gardiner removal to the west.

 

[DSC]

Coming to General Govt Committee next week: https://secure.toronto.ca/council/agenda-item.do?item=2023.GG7.13

The purpose of this report is to advise of the results of Request for Proposals RFP-22ECS-BE-01GE, Contract Number 22ECS-BE-01GE for the rehabilitation of the F.G. Gardiner Expressway between Dufferin Street and Strachan Avenue ("Gardiner Section 2") and request the authority to enter into an agreement with Grascan Construction Limited in the amount of $260,250,000 net of all taxes and charges ($264,830,400 net of Harmonized Sales Tax recoveries). An additional $40,000,000 net of all taxes and charges ($40,704,000 net of Harmonized Sales Tax recoveries) will be available to the Chief Engineer and Executive Director, Engineering and Construction Services for the Project as may be required.

The F.G. Gardiner Expressway has been in service for over 60 years and with the effects of weathering, salt, and increasing traffic loads, is approaching the end of its original design life. To address this state-of-good-repair challenge, a Strategic Rehabilitation Plan, consisting of six complex projects, was adopted by City Council in December 2016. Section 1 construction work was completed in 2021.

The subject of this report is the selection of the contractor for Section 2, to rehabilitate the elevated section of the Expressway between Dufferin Street and Strachan Avenue. There is an urgent need to award this contract because this section is in poor condition and at the end of its design life.

The scope of work for Gardiner Section 2 involves replacing 700 metres of concrete deck and girders, rehabilitating the associated substructure, and installing new street lighting. Construction is planned to commence in late 2023 and is anticipated to be completed by mid-2027.

There are a number of complexities to this project as this is both an elevated and very narrow section of the Expressway that is expected to manage a high volume of traffic. This will necessitate a significant amount of work being done from the underneath of the roadway. It also severely limits the construction staging and work zone areas.

There are also significant complexities in relation to the need to tightly align and closely coordinate with Metrolinx Ontario Line construction at Exhibition Station along with plans for the FIFA World Cup 2026™ Soccer Tournament. For example, construction on the deck will pause from May 1 to July 31, 2026, in order to allow three lanes of traffic open in each direction to accommodate tournament traffic. Pausing a project of this magnitude and safely reopening all traffic lanes is a substantial endeavour and it will be critical to reach a certain stage of the project on time to ensure this pause can be provided.

Given the number of complexities associated with this project, several risk mitigation measures have been built in. These include processes such as the use of a Design-Build project delivery method and a two-stage procurement strategy that included consideration of the proponent's traffic and construction management strategies. Risk management is also integrated into the recommended contract, with features such as an indexing regime to manage price fluctuations for certain commodities, the use of a Third-Party Quality Assurance Firm, a full-time, onsite Technical Advisor, as well as a neutral “Referee" to address any disputes that cannot be resolved by the Project Steering Committee.

 

[drum118]

Coming to General Govt Committee next week: https://secure.toronto.ca/council/agenda-item.do?item=2023.GG7.13

The purpose of this report is to advise of the results of Request for Proposals RFP-22ECS-BE-01GE, Contract Number 22ECS-BE-01GE for the rehabilitation of the F.G. Gardiner Expressway between Dufferin Street and Strachan Avenue ("Gardiner Section 2") and request the authority to enter into an agreement with Grascan Construction Limited in the amount of $260,250,000 net of all taxes and charges ($264,830,400 net of Harmonized Sales Tax recoveries). An additional $40,000,000 net of all taxes and charges ($40,704,000 net of Harmonized Sales Tax recoveries) will be available to the Chief Engineer and Executive Director, Engineering and Construction Services for the Project as may be required.

The F.G. Gardiner Expressway has been in service for over 60 years and with the effects of weathering, salt, and increasing traffic loads, is approaching the end of its original design life. To address this state-of-good-repair challenge, a Strategic Rehabilitation Plan, consisting of six complex projects, was adopted by City Council in December 2016. Section 1 construction work was completed in 2021.

The subject of this report is the selection of the contractor for Section 2, to rehabilitate the elevated section of the Expressway between Dufferin Street and Strachan Avenue. There is an urgent need to award this contract because this section is in poor condition and at the end of its design life.

The scope of work for Gardiner Section 2 involves replacing 700 metres of concrete deck and girders, rehabilitating the associated substructure, and installing new street lighting. Construction is planned to commence in late 2023 and is anticipated to be completed by mid-2027.

There are a number of complexities to this project as this is both an elevated and very narrow section of the Expressway that is expected to manage a high volume of traffic. This will necessitate a significant amount of work being done from the underneath of the roadway. It also severely limits the construction staging and work zone areas.

There are also significant complexities in relation to the need to tightly align and closely coordinate with Metrolinx Ontario Line construction at Exhibition Station along with plans for the FIFA World Cup 2026™ Soccer Tournament. For example, construction on the deck will pause from May 1 to July 31, 2026, in order to allow three lanes of traffic open in each direction to accommodate tournament traffic. Pausing a project of this magnitude and safely reopening all traffic lanes is a substantial endeavour and it will be critical to reach a certain stage of the project on time to ensure this pause can be provided.

Given the number of complexities associated with this project, several risk mitigation measures have been built in. These include processes such as the use of a Design-Build project delivery method and a two-stage procurement strategy that included consideration of the proponent's traffic and construction management strategies. Risk management is also integrated into the recommended contract, with features such as an indexing regime to manage price fluctuations for certain commodities, the use of a Third-Party Quality Assurance Firm, a full-time, onsite Technical Advisor, as well as a neutral “Referee" to address any disputes that cannot be resolved by the Project Steering Committee.

Expect 3.5 years of 2 lanes traffic gridlock for both direction with the Lake Shore at a crawl. Crascan has no room to sit up an area like they did for the east end and do what they did for that area here.

Some where that will be added to the mess or may get shift down the road is the new Dufferin Bridge, let alone the other bridges, When that happens, GO and VIA trains will be on detour, but will still offer a better way around the gridlock mess.

There will be some impact on TTC 509 and 511 using the Exhibition Loop.