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Roads: Gardiner Expressway

DarnDirtyApe said:
Last Saturday the Gardiner was close from 427 to DVP. On Saturday morning (around 11AM) the DVP northbound was jammed, 401 was jammed in both directions, and even Dupont street in town was way busier than normal. Our road network is basically pushing up against the breaking point at the best of times, and any disruption leads to total chaos everywhere.
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The ramifications of closing overutilized sections of highway do not translate into the ramifications of closing underutilized sections of highway.
 
k10ery said:
Let's face it folks, the Gardiner is a bargain. You're either fer it or agen it, but if you're agen it, it's because you just plain hate cars.
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I don't hate cars. I own a car. I regularly rent a second car for work because my wife needs our 1 car. I periodically drive into the core for work, but only if I need to drive somewhere else during the day. On the weekend I regularly take the Gardiner/DVP to Scarborough/Markham for Chinese food. I just look out at the Eastern Gardiner/Portlands from my office and think (a) that's a really underutilized stretch of road; and (b) the whole Donlands/Portlands would have so much more potential without it.
 
k10ery said:
The eastbound Gardiner is already regularly backed up from Jarvis to Park Lawn. So, anything that slows traffic at Jarvis, even a bit, will necessarily affect drivers all the way back to Park Lawn, right? That's just logic.
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The trick is to eliminate both the Gardiner and the reason it exists. i.e. rush hour commuters in single passenger vehicles. To do this, either move the jobs to the suburbs where people live (not feasible) or make it easier to get from the suburbs to those downtown jobs.

So, knock down the Gardiner, do not widen Lakeshore (but remove some lights, add roundabouts and pedestrian underpasses, like in Chicago), and build more passenger rail service from the burbs to downtown. It has to be affordable - for example, my car is paid for, I spend about $5,000 a year on fuel, maintenance and insurance, or about $13 a day. Get people from Milton/Stouffville/Pickering to Union (and other downtown stops) and back for about $15 a day (less than $4K annually @ 260 working days) with 30 min each way and I think you can kill the Gardiner. Then you can charge tolls on Lakeshore for anyone who still wants to drive into the city - but the solution comes first, then the tolls. Financing may be needed from the province until the tolls can pay it back.
 
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torontologist said:
What a biased little report that is, funded by "The Gardiner Coalition".

Industry has left our downtown waterfront, with the exception of a few holdovers like Redpath. It's now in the sprawl; those areas have more than enough access to highways for shipping goods. It's no wonder the CAA is behind this study, you can count on a knee-jerk reaction from them any time there might be something that potentially inconveniences someone driving an automobile somewhere.

The fact of the matter is that cities all over the developed world are taking down their highways. We would be the one of the only ones to invest money in a new elevated expressway. And it is a significant investment: we'd be spending $500 million to save 3% of commuters 3-10 minutes. Not only would it be an immense waste of taxpayer money, I would argue that it would be immoral, considering that it could be put towards improving the lives of many more people through transit. The boulevard option not only compliments development of the Unilever lands, it would also generate thousands of new jobs through the development that would happen on either side of the new Lakeshore. It would also generate a greater amount of municipal tax revenue for the city to pay for the necessary work to take it down in the first place. The replace option costs more and generates less money.

I was a firm supporter of the replace option, however having read the reports that have come out in the last few months, it just doesn't make economic sense to keep it elevated. I'm all for maintaining the western Gardiner and DVP, but an elevated link between the two is not worth $500,000,000+ when this city has so many urgent issues that need funding.
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If this is biased...then how about the city report? It is even more so (since it is not comparing apples to apples). Showing the time increase assuming some transit is built and then not including the cost of the transit? Not a rational comparison.

Even if you assume that it can be torn down, it cannot be until this transit system is built (without a 5-10 minute increase in commuting time). The city's costs ignore this fact and assume there are relatively no maintenance costs until it is torn down.

To keep to this 2 minute promise there should have been 4 options that the city looked at:

1. Maintain
2. Hybrid
3. Tear down, including transit costs and including maintenance until the transit is built.
4. Tear down immediately but include the cost of additional commuting time until the transit is built.
 
The primary argument for removing the Gardiner is to increase development in that area. But if we add 50 condos & office towers, then traffic is going to skyrocket. So it's sort of a Catch-22: Removing the Gardiner will improve demand for that area, but then it will not be able to be serviced by adequate roadways.
 
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Why are the rebuild options still six lanes wide? If it's under capacity, shouldn't the rebuild options at least propose cutting it down to four lanes to reduce the footprint?
 
CDL.TO said:
Why are the rebuild options still six lanes wide? If it's under capacity, shouldn't the rebuild options at least propose cutting it down to four lanes to reduce the footprint?
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Because we are trying to ultimately improve traffic in the city not choke it!

I too wish cars would disappear, but they won't. Unless we legislate them out, they will continue to crowd our streets. The Gardiner serves a purpose and the eastern section should definitely be reviewed and possibly rebuilt, but it has to be grade separated. Our highway network is already disjointed which explains our abnormally bad traffic.
 
It's 5:35 pm and the Eastern Gardiner is smooth sailing in both directions until you hit the Yonge Ramp in the west and the DVP in the East.
 
CDL.TO said:
Why are the rebuild options still six lanes wide? If it's under capacity, shouldn't the rebuild options at least propose cutting it down to four lanes to reduce the footprint?
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Because City Hall and their developer friends have already decided what they want and have to get to the right answer! :)

Eastbound it is already choked at 2 lanes prior to Jarvis. I wonder what the traffic study would have said with this reduced capacity. I would also like to understand the pedestrian crossing patterns on the tear down alternative and if they assumed the new turtle speed that the city assumes for timing. And the left/right turn issues and the impact of pedestrians & bike lanes.
 
Grimace said:
It's 5:35 pm and the Eastern Gardiner is smooth sailing in both directions until you hit the Yonge Ramp in the west and the DVP in the East.
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And how does it look down on Lake Shore? :)

It would not take much congestion at the offramps to fill in that smooth sailing between Yonge and Jarvis. Then the whole thing is congested again.
 
torontologist said:
And it is a significant investment: we'd be spending $500 million to save 3% of commuters 3-10 minutes.
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Whether it's 3-5 minutes (city estimate) or 5-10 minutes (U of T estimate) delay, that's a lot of extra cars idling and fuel burning at rush hour. I'd like to see an estimate of the health impacts of that. With so many people now living along the central and western Gardiner, that would be really costly. Thousands of cases more asthma, more heart attacks, more chronic child illnesses. All because we intentionally took out a working highway and made our rush hour traffic worse. Will the proponents of the tear down admit they're doing this?
 
W. K. Lis said:
[video=vimeo;126652099]https://vimeo.com/126652099[/video]
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So Peter J Park asks in video; "Do any of you live in a town where folks would like a freeway through their neighborhood? Its a preposterous notion".

Actually no its not. For instance I deliberately chose to move closer to a highway many years ago and to this day I remain quite satisfied with that decision. I imagine I'm not alone in that opinion.
 
Filip said:
Because we are trying to ultimately improve traffic in the city not choke it!

I too wish cars would disappear, but they won't. Unless we legislate them out, they will continue to crowd our streets. The Gardiner serves a purpose and the eastern section should definitely be reviewed and possibly rebuilt, but it has to be grade separated. Our highway network is already disjointed which explains our abnormally bad traffic.
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There's no use in building excess road capacity. The ultimate achievement of a transit-oriented city is that less space has to be devoted to cars. The transit-oriented city can afford to build great amenities like pedestrianized streets, large parks and networks of bike lanes without even encountering political blow back. But it has to shun building excess capacity.
 
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