The Great Gardiner Debate

City council will today debate the relative merits of three options for dealing with the eastern Gardiner Expressway, which, completed in the 1960s, is nearing the end of its useful lifespan.

The first option would be to leave well enough alone, to rebuild and maintain it. This at an estimated cost of $291 million.

The second, dubbed the “hybrid” option, should take about 18 months and involves keeping much of the elevated section east of Jarvis while relocating some of the ramps. It should cost about $336 million and take 18 months, and would leave the Gardiner open through much of construction. Among its prominent supporters is John Tory.

The third, a removal option often referred to in the press as the “boulevard” option, would mean six years of construction and removing the same elevated section in favour of an at-grade boulevard, at a cost of $240 million, six years of construction, and potential traffic nightmares. (Costs are John Tory’s, who argued for the hybrid option at a recent Empire Club speech.) The Waterfront Toronto board likes this one.

Support in the city according to a Mainstreet Technologies survey is for removing it, at 45%, with about 33% saying it should be rebuilt in its current form. Some 12% weren’t sure and another 11% didn’t like either option.

Each option has its supporters and detractors, with educated opinions coming from every direction, but there are so many present and future layers to the problem, it’s a tough one to sift through.

I’m inclined to agree with Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell, who said in the Sun that the broader issue is a value judgment — what do we want the future of the City of Toronto to look like? And more importantly, how do we want it to feel and function for the people who live and work here? What really matters to our residents?

Planner John van Nostrand in a Sun article called the removal option, in which commuters would come down the DVP and hit a multi-lane (as wide as 10 at some points with turning lanes) boulevard, a “total pain in the ass,” and said it would create a problem we don’t need to create. It could cost commuters between three and 10 minutes a day to suddenly encounter traffic lights and lose the highway speed limit in favour of a 60 km/h limit on the new boulevard. University Avenue, to which the as-yet-fictional boulevard has been compared, is four lanes in each direction and it’s already hard to get across it. The lost productivity has the potential to greatly impact the bottom line in less measurable costs, both financially and to the wellness of those stuck on it.

Campbell and his board support the boulevard option for its potential impact on development of the eastern waterfront, as does chief city planner Jennifer Keesmaat. The boulevard would form the backbone of a new neighbourhood in a part of the city that has only recently begun its transformation from urban blight to viable community.

There’s an old study supporting my favourite option: take the elevated section down and put it below grade. We stand to lose hundreds of millions more than the cost of the changes themselves in the future, as we struggle to control pollution as well as traffic and revenue loss, as well as making the inner city less desirable for future commercial considerations. Perhaps I’m being sentimental — I love a great waterfront, and ours doesn’t have much of a shot if we keep that elevated eyesore around, regardless of where we put the ramps. A Gardiner tunnel option could cost $2.5 billion in capital, and includes some ingress and egress headaches to boot, which has all but taken the option off the table.

And doesn’t the entire Gardiner debate take attention away from one of our biggest problems — a sad old transit system? According to Torontoish.com, only about 3% of all travel to the core uses that stretch of the eastern Gardiner, with traffic peeling off the DVP into downtown right from Eglinton south to Richmond. The downtown population will continue its growth because it never depended on road access anyway — it has all been handled by increased transit and GO regional railroad lines, and even a “new” Gardiner won’t help nor hinder traffic, because its capacity is already maxed out. The website says 50,000 new residents will in the next few years move into the developments stretching east from Yonge to the Don River and south to the shipping channel in the Port Lands, plus 20,000 new workers and students, far more than can be serviced by a couple of stations along the northern edge of the new development. Waterfront development doesn’t depend on the Gardiner — it depends on better transit.

I think Keesmaat has it right — expressways are from a bygone era when cities were something to be gotten through. We don’t live in that world anymore. We need a “grand city-building gesture,” as she says, and removal of the Gardiner would create a new streetscape that’s more pedestrian and bike-friendly than the roads under the Gardiner, which are not only dark and gloomy but downright dangerous for anyone without a few tons of steel around them.

While the hybrid option, which has the least potential to impact traffic, is maybe the politically correct choice, we need more guts, more vision and yes, a little more time, if we’re going to get this one right. Like most city residents, I’ll be eagerly awaiting an outcome.