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Roads: Gardiner Expressway

What's unrealistic about it? Boston, Montreal, Madrid, Paris, and Tokyo are all cities with underground expressways. Only some of these are tolled. Tolls would pay for both the expressways and tunneling of subway lines, all at the expense of drivers. This can be done without adding tolls on existing highways. It's an easy, inexpensive way of improving commute times, reducing congestion, improving air quality (due to less idling), adding rapid transit, and improving the pedestrian experience at street level. It beautifies the city. The only convincing counter argument I've heard so far relates to the impact of on/off ramps, but these can be very simple and discrete, a one-lane climb to or descent from the right hand lane at street level, as long as the expressway follows the same direction as surface traffic. I think the 'flying cars' response just about sums up the tone in this debate. Bring forward technical or financial arguments, but simplistic 'dude get over it' type responses of the sort from LNahid and pstogios are unhelpful and do not speak for everyone.
 
Euphoria said:
What's unrealistic about it? Boston, Montreal, Madrid, Paris, and Tokyo are all cities with underground expressways. Only some of these are tolled. Tolls would pay for both the expressways and tunneling of subway lines, all at the expense of drivers. This can be done without adding tolls on existing highways. It's an easy, inexpensive way of improving commute times, reducing congestion, improving air quality (due to less idling), adding rapid transit, and improving the pedestrian experience at street level. It beautifies the city. The only convincing counter argument I've heard so far relates to the impact of on/off ramps, but these can be very simple and discrete, a one-lane climb to or descent from the right hand lane at street level, as long as the expressway follows the same direction as surface traffic. I think the 'flying cars' response just about sums up the tone in this debate. Bring forward technical or financial arguments, but simplistic 'dude get over it' type responses of the sort from LNahid and pstogios are unhelpful and do not speak for everyone.
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A major problem apart from the politics is the fact that the city doesnt have the initial capital to even borrow enough money to fund the project. Not to mention, the immense risks involve. As Boston clearly showed, they ended paying many many billions more for the final product. They wouldve cancelled it long ago, but they were too far into the game to pull out. I think in today's climate, unless the spender has immense capital to risk like our oil sheikh friends in the east, mega projects like this are simply unrealistic.
 
I wouldn't put a penny of city money towards this project apart from the operating costs of the subway line. Torontonians will pay high tolls to have additional commute options. This from a Sept. 18, 2014 Globe and Mail article:

"With Toronto facing an unending overhaul of the Gardiner Expressway, thoughts of tunnelling are never far away. The idea gained particular prominence four years ago when mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi suggested running the truncated Allen Expressway underground from Eglinton Avenue to downtown. That route proposal wasn’t taken seriously, but Rossi, now president of Prostate Cancer Canada, maintains it’s a strategy that Toronto should pursue.

'We have ignored transportation infrastructure for so long that incrementalism is not really an option,' says Rossi, arguing that revenue from Highway 407 shows major road projects can be financed through tolls because people will pay for options.

Brian Garrod, executive vice-president of Hatch, an engineering project management firm in Toronto that is involved with the partially underground Eglinton Crosstown LRT, says tunnels are more expensive to construct than elevated expressways. But over the long run, the costs converge, owing to the lower maintenance costs and longer lifespans of underground roads."
 
Euphoria said:
Bring forward technical or financial arguments, but simplistic 'dude get over it' type responses of the sort from LNahid and pstogios are unhelpful and do not speak for everyone.
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I have brought forward financial arguments in the past. Read back a few pages instead of saying my posts are unhelpful.

What if no one wants to pay the ridiculously high tolls to use this highway?
 
Euphoria said:
Boston, Montreal, Madrid, Paris, and Tokyo are all cities with underground expressways. Only some of these are tolled. Tolls would pay for both the expressways and tunneling of subway lines, all at the expense of drivers. This can be done without adding tolls on existing highways. It's an easy, inexpensive way of improving commute times, reducing congestion, improving air quality (due to less idling), adding rapid transit, and improving the pedestrian experience at street level. It beautifies the city. The only convincing counter argument I've heard so far relates to the impact of on/off ramps, but these can be very simple and discrete, a one-lane climb to or descent from the right hand lane at street level, as long as the expressway follows the same direction as surface traffic. I think the 'flying cars' response just about sums up the tone in this debate. Bring forward technical or financial arguments, but simplistic 'dude get over it' type responses of the sort from LNahid and pstogios are unhelpful and do not speak for everyone.
Click to expand...

Euphoria, you're delusional. Where in Paris do they have underground expressways? If you're talking about the A86, that's equivalent to the 407, not Gardiner. On the other hand, they're closing the roads along the Seine in the summer in order to put in a beach! So, Paris is not a good example.

Boston's big dig was a nightmare that spent multi-billions more than planned and has ended up with greenspace that (reportedly) no one uses.

Anyone that cites Montreal's unbelievably crappy highways, and particularly the piece that cuts off downtown/Sherbrooke from the Old City, as a positive example of a road needs to be made to walk from McGill to Old Montreal. It's a terrible, completely hostile cut through the city.

You cannot set a toll high enough to 'pay for the expressways and subway lines'. Witness the Torontonian craziness of not being willing to pay $20 for a superior train ride to the airport! So, your scheme is we borrow and spend $10 billion plus to bury an expressway so people in cars can travel past downtown in comfort, then get them to pay us back through road tolls they will avoid. I assume your end game is a federal bailout?

This is more farcical than the 'let's build an Olympic stadium to get an NFL team' goofiness.
 
A slightly more temperate post: with the exception of the east Gardiner from Jarvis to the Don, there is neither money nor reason to bury the Gardiner nor tear it down. That's because the world there has changed: The condos and commercial buildings that make up SoCo and now stretch to the Exhibition grounds on both sides of the Gardiner have made it not necessary to change that piece of the Gardiner for 'city-building' reasons.

From Jarvis east to the Don, we had the opportunity to tear down the most useless piece of the expressway and decided not to do so. It was a missed opportunity, but not one that burying that stretch of the Gardiner at huge expense would cure. Burying the Gardiner is a non-starter.
 
Then keep the elevated Gardiner. Use underground toll highways to reduce congestion and pay for subways. This is a no lose proposition that makes tearing down the Gardiner possible should we so choose. Always better to have more choices than fewer.
 
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