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Roads: Keep the Gardiner, fix it, or get rid of it? (2005-2014)

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Just toll the thing. Bury it. Put the eight land grand Lakeshore on top. Anything else is a useless gimmick.
 
^ Yeah, toll the Gardiner and DVP, but use the money to pay for transit expansion.

Electronic tolls on the DVP for both incoming and outgoing traffic, and classic toll booths on all incoming traffic on Gardiner (to increase the amount of gridlock on the QEW in Mississauga). Only 905 residents would be subject to tolls to make them more politically viable to 416 voters and so tourism is not affected.

Putting the Gardiner underground or getting rid of it altogether is kind of pointless with that rail corridor remaing there as a barrier.
 
The High Line in NYC was converted because the trains used a new subway below.
There is no subway below the High Line - the closest is the 8th Avenue line - but it's older than the High Line as far as I know.

Also the High Line never carried passengers - it was only freight. I've certainly never noticed any stations. And there is no freight subways.

Perhaps you are thinking of some of the old elevated lines in Manhattan from the 1800s - such as the Ninth Avenue line which was demolished in the 1940s.
 
Why wouldn't you just tear the Gardiner down and build a linear park in its place at ground level, if you're not going to use it for cars?

Exactly. This is the worst of both worlds--no expressway downtown and an inaccessible park in exchange.

From what I've seen High Line Park is a lot narrower (and lower) than the Gardiner platform.
 
That's what you get when you let architects design transportation systems.

(1) Gardiner + Lakeshore = 12 lanes, so upgrading Lakeshore to 8-lanes is a 33% reduction in capacity.

(2) It would be open in the middle?! It's that a major safety hazard, like people falling/jumping into the middle of the 8-lane Lakeshore below?

(3) $2 toll on Lakeshore only? Sounds like even more congestion causing to get around it. If not, it's toll infrastructure costs to collect about $40,000 a day ($10.4m a year).

(4) I like the CNE and DVP parking lots with TTC pass, but $15 a day? Either people need to park downtown temporarily and pay $10 per hour or they park permanently for less than $300 a month. So if both options are cheaper, who's going to park in no man's land?

(5) A transit line to Toronto Island?! We can't even build a bridge/tunnel to the Airport. I don't know about anyone else, but I like the ferry and those rich enough to live on the Islands mostly have their own boats.

(6) For the $1.5 billion dollar price tag, we just could hold another G20 Summit to cause congestion instead.
 
All that maintenance expense for a park? You can't be serious, if you're going to propose that you might as well just let the thing crumble and have the park below it. An 8 lane Lakeshore? You think crossing it now is tough????

Some candidate please put in motion to have the Gardiner buried, it's the most logical and IMHO economical solution.
 
Dumb idea. If you get cars off the Gardiner you should tear it down or put transit on it. There is no point using it for pedestrians because pedestrians travel shorter distances and will need new accessible ways to get on and off the elevated path and it still leaves a dead zone underneath. Pedestrians would be better served by burying the Gardiner and making Lakeshore the park land.
 
This proposal is more than a bit silly.

The shifting of all traffic to a hugely expanded Lakeshore Boulevard underneath the still-extant structure of the Gardiner would fail to solve problems of traffic volume, aesthetics and urban accessibility. The urban fabric leading to the water would not be improved by the expansion of Lakeshore Boulevard (with the Gardiner still extant over it), nor necessarily pedestrian or vehicular flow to the waterfront.

The cost of alterations to the Gardiner (and Lakeshore) would be enormous - with no great net gain offsetting it. The parks would be awkward to access, and being outdoors, not be heavily used a great deal of the year. The transit lines don't look like much in the way of compensation, especially since the amount of elevated road surface and available lanes for such transit is to be at least halved.

There are plenty of interesting ideas of what to do with the Gardiner, but I don't think this is one of the better thought out ones.
 
^ Yeah, toll the Gardiner and DVP, but use the money to pay for transit expansion.

Electronic tolls on the DVP for both incoming and outgoing traffic, and classic toll booths on all incoming traffic on Gardiner (to increase the amount of gridlock on the QEW in Mississauga). Only 905 residents would be subject to tolls to make them more politically viable to 416 voters and so tourism is not affected.

Putting the Gardiner underground or getting rid of it altogether is kind of pointless with that rail corridor remaing there as a barrier.

Yes, increase gridlock! I'm sure all those idoling cars will do wonders for the air quality...

And seeing how more and more people are commuting out of the downtown to work in the suburbs, maybe Peel, York, and Durham can put up tolls for thoe wanting to leave Toronto! Or how about something like the Berlin Wall? It is the only way to keep suburbanites and urbanists from ever touching each other's territory!

On topic, I think Mammoliti is more interested in getting his name in the paper, regardless if he has to make himself look like a baffoon, than he is of winning the election.
 
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I agree this is a completely ridiculous proposal. It'll never happen, thank goodness.
 
Very disappointing. You call this futuristic? Where are the flying cars or the human teleportation cubicles? C'mon Giorgio, you're wallowing in Pantalone territory here - give us a vision already! Barrier to pedestrians? So if an elevated roadway is a barrier to pedestrians walking underneath, what kind of a barrier will an 8-lane (or whatever they propose) Lakeshore with increased traffic be? Maybe they'll install pole-vaults or trampolines for pedestrians to get across... :p
 
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