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Roads: Gardiner Expressway

DarnDirtyApe said:
The amount of FUD and misconstruing of stats on both sides is appalling. I just read Matt's post on "The Road to Progress" and it seems that Joe Mihevc is spinning hard himself. Using the fallacious 100 year stats and ignoring the "maintain" option to imply that removing the highway is far cheaper than the other options, saying that we can build the Waterfront East LRT with the "savings" and ignoring that those savings are all far in the future, focusing solely on the AM rush hour downtown commuters and ignoring the rest, and so on. All because they want to create an "urban high quality place" in this one specific area of the city that happens to host an expressway.

Meanwhile he and other remove proponents want to funnel cars onto Richmond and Adelaide and through existing neighbourhoods...
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No, they want to put an urban high quality space on the city's waterfront, and get rid of a crumbling expressway.
 
As if the Gardiner doesn't currently funnel cars into existing neigbhourhoods? To use that as a talking point on the pro side is rather weird. Like honestly, first it's concern for the pedestrians and now neighbourhood integrity (and I am not even going to entertain more wild claims - e.g. Bernadetti's bizarre GHG argument) Can we drop the pretense and say that it really is about saving a few minutes for a few thousand drivers at the height of rush?

AoD
 
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Infact, having more frequent intersections instead of infrequent on/off ramps may ease congestion in areas around the at-grade road by relieving the on/off ramp bottleneck points.
 
cplchanb said:
source of this claim?
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Logic.

Let's say you have a 10km road, with exits only at the start and end. Let's say that 100 people are driving along that road, and all want to go to a multitude of destinations near the end of the route. However, all traffic must exit at the only exit.

Now, let's take the same 10km road and add intermediate stops, spaced every 2km. That means there are five potential exit points. The same 100 cars will obviously be more dispersed among the 5 exits, than among the 1 exit in the first example.
 
cplchanb said:
source of this claim?
Click to expand...

No source. Notice I said "may ease congestion" not "will ease congestion". Logically, if you split the same number of cars between more entrance/exit points you should be decreasing the congestion around each entrance/exit point.

ETA wopchop beat me to it.
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
As if the Gardiner doesn't currently funnel cars into existing neigbhourhoods? To use that as a talking point on the pro side is rather weird. Like honestly, first it's concern for the pedestrians and now neighbourhood integrity (and I am not even going to entertain more wild claims - e.g. Bernadetti's bizarre GHG argument) Can we drop the pretense and say that it really is about saving a few minutes for a few thousand drivers at the height of rush?

AoD
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The whole point of a highway is to bypass city streets - if you remove it, by definition there will be more traffic in existing neighbourhoods as people seek alternate routes. Remember the whole discussion about increase the capacity of the Richmond off-ramp so that more cars could travel that way?
 
DarnDirtyApe said:
The whole point of a highway is to bypass city streets - if you remove it, by definition there will be more traffic in existing neighbourhoods as people seek alternate routes. Remember the whole discussion about increase the capacity of the Richmond off-ramp so that more cars could travel that way?
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Except that all your traffic originating and terminating within the core area had to go on city streets - they don't magically originate or end on the highway.

AoD
 
wopchop said:
Logic.

Let's say you have a 10km road, with exits only at the start and end. Let's say that 100 people are driving along that road, and all want to go to a multitude of destinations near the end of the route. However, all traffic must exit at the only exit.

Now, let's take the same 10km road and add intermediate stops, spaced every 2km. That means there are five potential exit points. The same 100 cars will obviously be more dispersed among the 5 exits, than among the 1 exit in the first example.
Click to expand...

Except that in this case the "remove" option creates a "single exit" (aside from Richmond of course) which is the end of the highway and the first traffic light on Lakeshore. Now the cars that previously stayed on the highway are now forced to hit all five "exit points" even though they are through traffic. The cars will be more dispersed but only because the traffic lights are bottlenecks, not because routes are actually dispersed.
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
Except that all your traffic originating and terminating within the core area had to go on city streets - they don't magically originate or end on the highway.

AoD
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No of course, but that traffic isn't going away... all you are doing is redistributing cars along alternate routes that may or may not be suited to handle the additional traffic.

Existing traffic on Yonge/Bay/York will not change because there will be the same number of cars. If anything it will become more clustered (i.e., congested) as the upstream lights lead to clumps in the traffic.
 
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DarnDirtyApe said:
No of course, but that traffic isn't going away... all you are doing is redistributing cars along alternate routes that may or may not be suited to handle the additional traffic.
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Richmond and Adelaide are just about the most suitable for handling this type of traffic, considering the one way nature of the routes; and besides, as mentioned, increasing the number of access points can only help to distribute the load far better than restricting it to a few off ramps as an expressway would. And besides, the limiter really isn't traffic lights - it is whether the roadways are saturated, and there is no way around that Gardiner East or otherwise.

AoD
 
AlvinofDiaspar said:
Richmond and Adelaide are just about the most suitable for handling this type of traffic, considering the one way nature of the routes; and besides, as mentioned, increasing the number of access points can only help to distribute the load far better than restricting it to a few off ramps as an expressway would. And besides, the limiter really isn't traffic lights - it is whether the roadways are saturated, and there is no way around that Gardiner East or otherwise.

AoD
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I'd argue that a grade-separated highway is better than two streets that run through the redeveloping east side of downtown and then abruptly dump traffic onto already congested streets in the west end (Spadina and Bathurst). There are a ton of potential redevelopment sites on those two streets - probably more potential than around the Don and the existing urban fabric is there already.

Also, the soon to be extended cycle tracks - which are great - take away a lane of traffic from each street...
 
DarnDirtyApe said:
Right, because we don't already have enough decades of underused waterfront land to develop; we need to get rid of that "crumbling expressway" right now instead.
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We do, actually. It's crumbling so badly (apparently because of the way it was built causing the salt to corrode everything, as per the G&M article on Gardiner) that it needs to be rebuilt or torn down. Ergo, we're having a conversation about this piece of road.

I'd say we're doing a pretty great job of building out the east waterfront at a much higher pace than I ever thought possible -- there are people living just east of Yonge, working just east of Jarvis, and lounging at a park just east of Sherbourne. They're starting to build up to Parliament -- the next step is just east of Parliament slip -- which, lo and behold is the part of the 'underused waterfront' that will remain underused if you get your way and we build a roadway instead of a city.
 
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