Roads: Gardiner Expressway

[44 North]

No, it's not a few people and it isn't their fault that plans didn't pan out decades ago.

Nor will it be the fault of subway riders in Vaughan that they're using a horribly over-built piece of infrastructure.

Nor is it the cyclists fault that some of the winding bicycle paths in the suburbs aren't used very well.


It is, however, an inefficient use of resources to continue to invest in over-scaled infrastructure.

Okay, but what about the Sheppard Subway. That’s over-scaled, and requires something like $10M in op costs/yr + major capital maintenance every decade or so. That’d come up to well over $1bn per century – which is a lot for a mere 5km line. Should we tear Sheppard down and bring it to the surface? And what about the Vaughan Subway...it’s not even open yet, but would it be better to nip things in the bud and just shutter the whole thing north of Steeles? And the Markham Subway clearly shouldn’t be started, considering how obviously "over-scaled" it would be.

Again with the 'experts are lying to us' anti-vaxxers' posts. There are reasons to be fore or against these proposals, and projections need to be understood to be just that: estimates of future behaviour, not written in stone guarantees. But the people who put together these studies aren't doing it just for the fun of it. They're really trying to lay out the feasible options.

Fair enough. But there are always ulterior motives with planning and studies. Be it political, financial, or miscellaneous (e.g environmental). If the City’s studies through the years were in fact always accurate and unbiased - we’d have a completed DRL up and running a generation ago. Also an Eglinton West Subway would never have been started, and Sheppard would’ve been as an LRT line.

The experts have been lying to us, and DO lie to us. Routinely.

 

[bobbob911]

The whole reason we're having this debate is because the Gardiner is falling down. So, the maintenance costs of the elevated expressway over time are absolutely relevant, and I'm sure bobbob1952 was saying that it didn't matter that the expressway would drop chunks of concrete in 2015. But it does.

Obviously the hybrid option will have maintenance costs, and obviously they will be higher than a boulevard. But using 100-year estimates for this is absolute garbage, has no relationship to reality. For example, in the short term, a brand spanking new raised highway will probably have *lower* maintenance costs compared to a boulevard, which will require things like street lights, tree plantings, curb cuts for utility access, etc etc.

Quite frankly, I don't care what the maintenance costs are estimated to be in the year 2100!!! I assume by then we will all be in flying cars

I also agree 100% with posts 2152 and 2155 - I simply don't believe that it will be an extra 3 minutes to drive from DVP to Jarvis on a surface roadway compared to a highway. I think that estimate is off by a factor of 5 at least.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

Not to mention all the future property tax revenues from the freed up lands.

In fact, that revenue should be more than enough to pay for the maintenance costs of the remove option.

 

[salsa]

If the proposal to tear down the Gardiner were to proceed there would be intensive development of the east Bayfront. This additional development would add to/slow the traffic in the east Lakeshore area and residents of the area would be inundated with traffic passing through to get to the DVP.

The 2031 traffic model assumed a full build out of the Portlands and a spike in downtown population and employment.

Advisors talk about how most downtown bound drivers on the DVP exit at Richmond. I challenge the stats. I take the trip everyday. I see more cars continuing southbound and into the core rather than exiting at Richmond. Richmond brings you to the north part of the core. It is very slow to get to King and Bay if you exit at Richmond during rush hour.

I don't know who exactly are you trying to challenge. Current traffic data says that 24% of DVP traffic exists at Richmond, with the rest continuing south onto the Gardiner. Sounds a lot like what you have observed.

After many years of minimal development activity in the south-east core there are multiple residential projects in flight or planned for Front, Wellington, Richmond and Adelaide east. With the additional residents these roadways will become more pedestrian and slower for cars. They will not be an effective substitute for a torn-down Gardiner.

Again, that's already been considered.

The west Gardiner was called an eyesore and an obstruction to development along the waterfront. The past 10-15 years has demonstrated that the Gardiner is irrelevant as significant development has occurred in and around the west Gardiner. I worked at Bay and Queens Quay for 10 years and would regularly walk into the core. The real obstruction between the core and the waterfront was the 100M walk in loud, ugly and dark corridors under the railway lines. The argument that the Gardiner obstructs access to the waterfront is a red herring as the rail lines on the east bayfront aren't going anywhere.

As the study has said, development will happen with either of the two alternatives. But keeping the highway will maintain the unpleasant pedestrian environment and poor aesthetics that lowers the quality of life for waterfront residents. Why should the rail corridor be an excuse to further tarnish the waterfront with this thing:

All this to say that there is no way that commuters will experience a 2-3 minute additional drive to get along a "6 lane boulevard" if we follow the proposal to tear down the Gardiner from the Don River to Jarvis. The best comparison is University Avenue. In the middle of the day it takes roughly 20 minutes to get up University Avenue, another "6 lane boulevard", from Front to Bloor. This isn't during rush hour.

We're talking about a planned 8 lane boulevard (not 6 lanes) with special traffic signal phasing and only six signalized intersections. And you're comparing that to a north-south route with many closely spaced intersections and a traffic signal system that probably wasn't re-timed for many years nor designed for high vehicle speeds. Please visit the recently rebuilt Hwy 7 East in Markham for a better comparison. You're point of view is a simplistic denial of the numbers produced by a highly competent team whose work was peer reviewed twice and took many things into account.

 

[TOareaFan]

In fact, that revenue should be more than enough to pay for the maintenance costs of the remove option.

how many acres is that $150 million coming from?

 

[salsa]

Obviously the hybrid option will have maintenance costs, and obviously they will be higher than a boulevard. But using 100-year estimates for this is absolute garbage, has no relationship to reality. For example, in the short term, a brand spanking new raised highway will probably have *lower* maintenance costs compared to a boulevard, which will require things like street lights, tree plantings, curb cuts for utility access, etc etc.

Quite frankly, I don't care what the maintenance costs are estimated to be in the year 2100!!! I assume by then we will all be in flying cars

Long term costs are not garbage. The Gardiner is only at year 50 or so and look at how much we are spending on it now.

I also agree 100% with posts 2152 and 2155 - I simply don't believe that it will be an extra 3 minutes to drive from DVP to Jarvis on a surface roadway compared to a highway. I think that estimate is off by a factor of 5 at least.

"I think that....", "I feel that....", what will probably happen is....", I refuse to believe...". Sadly these arguments are the best we can expect from the car people.

 

[bobbob911]

Long term costs are not garbage. The Gardiner is only at year 50 or so and look at how much we are spending on it now.

I didn't say long term costs are garbage. I said 100-year estimates are garbage. The best, the absolute best you could estimate out to with any kind of accuracy is maybe 25-30 years. Even then I still put *far* more weight on the initial costs than the ongoing maintenance costs.

Not sure what is meant by "car people" - I take the train to work everyday. I certainly have driven that highway connector though, and know how busy it can get. Have you?

 

[TheTigerMaster]

SOGR costs are very real. We spend several times on Gardiner per km what we spend on the DVP per km for maintenance, and we have been for many decades.

If you believe there is gravy in the city budget, this is the kind of place where you find it. The SOGR work itself is very real but the value for money spent on this section is quite poor IMO.

If this value per $ ratio is acceptable, then we need to raise taxes significantly because there are a ton of things I'd like to see built that have similar ratios.

As was pointed out yesterday, the reason the city investigated tearing it down is because the SOGR costs are so high. Also, we regularly choose options based on SOGR (Eglinton, finch and Sheppard LRT for example)

 

[junior43]

We're talking about a planned 8 lane boulevard (not 6 lanes) with special traffic signal phasing and only six signalized intersections. And you're comparing that to a north-south route with many closely spaced intersections and a traffic signal system that probably wasn't re-timed for many years nor designed for high vehicle speeds. Please visit the recently rebuilt Hwy 7 East in Markham for a better comparison. You're point of view is a simplistic denial of the numbers produced by a highly competent team whose work was peer reviewed twice and took many things into account.

This is actually what concerns me. I was originally in the keep/improve camp, but have come around to removal being the better option. My only remaining issue is what you pointed out. The signal's here will be timed and there are less intersections (crossing points). This 8 lane boulevard could turn into a high stakes game of Frogger at non rush hour times. It's basically a 8 lane parkway connecting two freeways. I don't think removal is devoid of it's own issues in this regard. Yes radar traps, etc can try to keep it to minimum, but I still envision a lot of people racing by at at least 80km/h.

 

[jcam]

Having done a few infrastructure and real estate financial models for various public entities, I can tell you that 100 years is a ludicrous time horizon. I've done a couple at 50 years and even that horizon is silly, because the inflation risk ends up swinging the numbers so much. Bridges are typically built for a 75-year life-cycle, but you're including probably 5 resurfacing in there. Our suggestion to clients is that 25-30 year planning horizons make the most sense.

Also, my brother tells me the reason they can't re-align the Gardiner along the railway tracks is that the turn would be too tight? I can only see that as being true if they figure they have to get the curve to go under the rail corridor. If it goes over the corridor, why on earth can't it curve and cross over, then dive under Eastern? Seems to me like this, like many studies including reports I've worked on, is "make the data tell me this".

From my overlay of the existing curve below, I don't see how you'd have any trouble with this alignment. It would also open up the edge of the river.

 

[aquateam]

Again with the 'experts are lying to us' anti-vaxxers' posts. There are reasons to be fore or against these proposals, and projections need to be understood to be just that: estimates of future behaviour, not written in stone guarantees. But the people who put together these studies aren't doing it just for the fun of it. They're really trying to lay out the feasible options.

That's not really a fair comparison. Right now all we see are two points on a powerpoint slide saying it isn't feasible. With vaccines you can see thousands of studies and textbooks that describe how they work. Here we have no idea how they came to their conclusions, and the lack of transparency makes it difficult to accept their conclusion. We can draw lines on the map with the same radius of curvature, and we can imagine scenarios where the water treatment plant isn't impinged upon, yet we have nothing to go on to explain why these weren't considered doable.

I've worked on engineering solutions where options we had discounted early on ended up coming back. In contexts like this, "feasibility" is really more a question of cost and political obstacles than physical impediments to it being constructed. Obstacles raised earlier fall away under further scrutiny. Not saying it's a good idea, but feasibility is a subjective judgement call rather than an objective yes/no. I'd consider the Big Dig infeasible but it was built anyway.

The environmental assessment team had a lot of work cut out for them, and other options had powerful interests in their favour (e.g. hybrid option). It isn't inconceivable that they didn't investigate this realignment because of resource constraints. If every permutation of a proposal gets the full render-with-trees-and-latte-sipping-cyclists treatment then the EA process becomes even more cumbersome then it already is.

At this point I'll trust their conclusions and concede that the railway alignment isn't possible, since I don't have a team of experts working for me. But in general I think that it's good that expert opinions get challenged. Experts produced the ridership projections for the Sheppard subway, experts supported the Spadina expressway and the TTC is run entirely by experts, so sometimes it's good to have laypersons (Jane Jacobs, Steve Munro, etc.) provide accountability.

 

[TrickyRicky]

On the surface, because I am not knowledgeable on the specifics of the project, I actually support the more expensive hybrid concept.

I think it's great that Toronto has a skeletal highway network rather than an extensive one but for me I think it is worth maintaining the existing 401, DVP, Gardiner, 427 highway loop as a separated and continuous loop. That loop continuity is, in my opinion, worth far more than arguments of localized development and neighbourhood quality of life issues.

My position is consistent with arguments I have made elsewhere in other threads that the city must necessarily be a place of diverse land-use. The arguments for mixed-use, people friendly neighbourhoods is sound; however, if you want to hit every corner of the city with this same hammer the city becomes impoverished, not enhanced, by such forms of urbanization.

Cities need highways, transit, ports, airports, parks, power stations, industrial lands, logistical yards etc. and I understand that for many the argument to tear this mother down is strong. I just feel that the city as a whole is better served by a continuous separated highway loop than a potential new development neighbourhood (which will be developed anyway regardless of the highway's presence).

 

[rbt]

Okay, but what about the Sheppard Subway.

I would kill most of it with prejudice if I was CEO of Toronto. CEO, of course, doesn't have to concern themselves with politics unlike the position of Mayor. Current Sheppard maintenance money would be used to build an at surface replacement sufficient for the next 30 years of load, probably in dedicated lanes with gate-arms at intersections. The upper part of Yonge station might be salvageable. Politics keeps Sheppard open.

The Spadina extension has problems to. Finch seems somewhat reasonable, beyond that a grade separated BRT would have done it for decades to come.

I don't think I would have let Eglinton get started either. I'm 99.9% certain CP would have sold us the mid-town corridor for way under $4B ($1B to relocate their yards, $400M for the corridor itself). This is well suited to the longer distance trips across the city if you include a branch to the airport in addition to Kipling. Eglinton bus riders want to travel east/west often to get downtown; very few actually want/need to be on Eglinton for their entire trip. With load at the ends removed and improved north/south bus service (to connect to the new crosstown line) the current Eglinton buses would be sufficient for some time.


The $12B (roughly the current day equivalent from those projects) from Spadina, Sheppard, and Eglinton would have made big headway on a TTC RER-like network inside Toronto's borders if we started in 1995 (instead of Sheppard/Eglinton first time around).

Past decisions cannot be changed, but there is no need to toss today's good money to support poor choices made decades ago.

 

[TheTigerMaster]

That's not really a fair comparison. Right now all we see are two points on a powerpoint slide saying it isn't feasible. With vaccines you can see thousands of studies and textbooks that describe how they work. Here we have no idea how they came to their conclusions, and the lack of transparency makes it difficult to accept their conclusion. We can draw lines on the map with the same radius of curvature, and we can imagine scenarios where the water treatment plant isn't impinged upon, yet we have nothing to go on to explain why these weren't considered doable.

I've worked on engineering solutions where options we had discounted early on ended up coming back. In contexts like this, "feasibility" is really more a question of cost and political obstacles than physical impediments to it being constructed. Obstacles raised earlier fall away under further scrutiny. Not saying it's a good idea, but feasibility is a subjective judgement call rather than an objective yes/no. I'd consider the Big Dig infeasible but it was built anyway.

The environmental assessment team had a lot of work cut out for them, and other options had powerful interests in their favour (e.g. hybrid option). It isn't inconceivable that they didn't investigate this realignment because of resource constraints. If every permutation of a proposal gets the full render-with-trees-and-latte-sipping-cyclists treatment then the EA process becomes even more cumbersome then it already is.

At this point I'll trust their conclusions and concede that the railway alignment isn't possible, since I don't have a team of experts working for me. But in general I think that it's good that expert opinions get challenged. Experts produced the ridership projections for the Sheppard subway, experts supported the Spadina expressway and the TTC is run entirely by experts, so sometimes it's good to have laypersons (Jane Jacobs, Steve Munro, etc.) provide accountability.

With the Sheppard Subway, the expectation was that the province would meet its goals for suburban growth centres, in this case Scarb Centre and NYCC. Obviously the province spectacularly failed to meet those goals. If those goals were met, the subway likely would have been successful.

 

[muller877]

Re: the streetcar...this is one reason I'd like to see the QQE / East Bayfront LRT instead use Lake Shore, and be bundled with the REMOVE or HYBRID option. Not only could this save costs, but with the Gardiner removed they have enough space to put in an elevated guideway to have the streetcar run at RT speeds between Union and Cherry.

What really bugs me is the comparisons. They look at traffic patterns assuming that a massive LRT system is built. If it isn't the slowdown is about 15 minutes, not 2 minutes. But then they look at cost and specifically exclude the same LRT proposal.

So instead of saying it's $900M for a rebuild vs $500M for a road it should be $900M for a rebuild vs $1.5b for a road + LRT