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Roads: Gardiner Expressway

Euphoria said:
Build on/off ramps to the Gardiner west of Bathurst and build a Front Street extension west of Bathurst. Build a Go station in that corridor for the Go Lakeshore line to eliminate the need for those riders to use Union, and build multi-level parking garages in the immediate vicinity of the new station. Have a spur from the new Downtown Relief Line come down from Queen to access this Go station (at least streetcars). Now you've got a means to increase the number of train sets on the Go lines heading into the city, including Smart Trac, and a means to keep cars out of the core because commuters can park and get on transit. At that point you can remove the elevated Gardiner. (An additional option if we insist on maintaining an expressway connection between the Gardiner west and the DVP is to make it an underground toll highway. I say put it in the same tunnel as the DRL. Tolls can pay the capital costs of the tunneling the DRL. It also means we wouldn't have to deal with the costs of keeping the existing Gardiner open as we try to tunnel underneath it, because we're tunneling elsewhere, and could keep the existing Gardiner open until the tunnel is complete.)
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nice... $50 tolls each way... cant wait
 
andrewpmk said:
From the same Public Works and Infrastructure Committee - they want to shut down the Gardiner and DVP again in 2016, 2017, and 2018 for a triathlon.

Why is shutting down major expressways in Toronto considered acceptable?
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Because these events bring more money into the city on a Sunday morning than you driving to Steak Queen would bring in.
 
rbt said:
It is probably already well beyond Gardiner's capacity during AM peak.,

Between Lake Shore East and Lake Shore West I see 12 trains (6 trains east) arriving at Union between 8am and 9am. They have a seated capacity of about 24,000 which GO probably achieves (end cars may have empty seats but middle cars have standing passengers).

Highway lanes typically get about 2500 vehicles per hour during ideal conditions and Gardiner has 6 lanes, so it might hit 15,000 vehicles between 8am and 9am. With low vehicle occupancy rates (around 1.1 per vehicle) GO should win, and that assumes free-flowing tightly-packed traffic on Gardiner which most days isn't what happens.
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Well that just shows the ridiculousness of investing so much money into this piece of infrastructure.

It is better spend electrifying the Lakeshore line, grade-separating the entirety of the corridor, extending the line further east and west to Bowmanville and Grimsby, and creating a bunch of new infill stations.

A boulevard can handle present demands adequately and provide automobile access to commuters which automobile access is a necessity.
 
tiffer24 said:
On a day that morning transit was cancelled for many on their way to work due to a lack of basic infrastructure investment, it's comforting to know that this massive project will ensure that car drivers will never have to experience an intolerable 3 minute delay in their daily commute.
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Although I agree with the sentiment of your post, I think an important and often overlooked point about limited-access grade-separated highways is that they offer drivers an alternative to the surface network. If we remove the Gardiner, many road users wanting to traverse the south end of the city will inevitably flood the surface network - hindering the mobility of buses, streetcars, peds, cyclists, etc in their wake. Maybe it's not a proverbial silver lining, but there most definitely are quantifiable benefits for non-drivers (and the city as a whole) by keeping/improving this piece of our expressway network.

Another point that I think is a tad misleading in this debate is the 100yr lifecycle cost. One hundred years is a fairly sizable window, one that we don't really see in discussions about transit. I've seen 25yr and 50yr operation/maintenance costs for subway or LRT projects. But never have I seen a century brought into the debate. Perhaps if we included the costs of, say, replacing tunnel liners or staffing stations for 100yrs, many would question the merits of certain transit projects as well.
 
44 North said:
Another point that I think is a tad misleading in this debate is the 100yr lifecycle cost. One hundred years is a fairly sizable window, one that we don't really see in discussions about transit. I've seen 25yr and 50yr operation/maintenance costs for subway or LRT projects. But never have I seen a century brought into the debate.
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100 years is entirely out of line. Net Present Value calculations rapidly bring expenses more than about 30 years down to very small values. It becomes silly to include them.

That said, I imagine the argument is that the pre-fab bridge deck pieces for the roadway and modern tunnel liners have an expected life-span of 100 years. 50 year calculations would have been more than sufficient and most likely a very similar result.

IMO, they should stick with a time-frame equal to the capital financing period; 30 years for long-lived capital projects in Toronto.
 
1. Cancel Gardiner East
2. Direct $600 Million in Gardiner East funding to Relief Line north extension
3. Cancel Bloor-Yonge Station upgrades (Relief Line extension directly negates the need for this)
4. Direct $1 Billion in Bloor Yonge Station upgrades to Relief Line north extension.

Now we've got two pesky items off of our capital backlog, and we'll have infrastructure that will be several times more impactful for east Toronto commuters than the Gardiner ever will be.
 
Results of the Gardiner East vote, mapped onto Toronto's new proposed ward boundaries for 2018. This gives an idea of how the new ward boundaries will shift the balance of policy in this city.

Results
Hybrid: 22
Boulevard: 22
Neither: 2
Unknown: 1

erP2TU6.jpg
 
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tiffer24 said:
On a day that morning transit was cancelled for many on their way to work due to a lack of basic infrastructure investment, it's comforting to know that this massive project will ensure that car drivers will never have to experience an intolerable 3 minute delay in their daily commute.
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Just a friendly reminder that the hybrid narrowly won, and it won only because John Tory lobbied hard for it using misleading numbers despite strong opposition from city staff.

http://www.thestar.com/news/city_ha...mbers-used-by-mayor-john-tory-misleading.html
 
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