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Roads: Gardiner Expressway catch-all, incl. Hybrid Design (2015-onwards)
- Thread starter jozl
- Start date
KevinT
Active Member
That was a great piece, I'm glad that the Globe published it. Hopefully enough people still read the news that a few will contact their councillors about it. (I can't, I'm in Kitchener.)
KhalilHeron
Active Member
How is it that American cities that have little to no public transit can demolish their freeways to no traffic disaster, or Vancouver survive without them but toronto can’t? I say tear it all down. If you wanna keep the newly built part open it as a park. The rest turn it into a boulevard with bus lanes so go busses can actually get into union or even build a streetcar line, or leave room for it at least. The money we spent on rebuilding the Gardiner is gone but that doesn’t mean we have to waste more money or that the infrastructure we built has to be for cars.
Bojaxs
Active Member
Because those American cities are not nearly as populated as Toronto. New York is the most transit friendly city in America and they still have the FDR in Manhattan. Chicago has highway 41, Boston and Seattle have tunneled their highways underneath their downtown cores.
KhalilHeron
Active Member
Montreal demolished the bonaventure expressway through downtown and built a park in its place. Seoul has done the same, renaturalizing the creek the highway was built on. San Francisco, and Portland have done the same. These may not be direct comparisons but they had the ambition we are lacking and all of those cities are better for it.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
what American cities have actually demolished a really busy freeway? none so far.
Rochester demolished their ring road which went nowhere.. San Fransisco demolished the Embarcadero freeway which was similarly a stub (similar to the part of the Gardiner east of the Don which was demolished in the early 2000's)... where else? Seattle demolished their waterfront freeway only after replacing it with a Tunnel.
The *only* "major" freeway demolition in the US I'm aware of is I81 in Syracuse, and even that isn't a particularly busy or critical highway connection being a small 4-lane elevated highway for which the majority of traffic can detour to the City's ring road with minimal time penalties.
Ward8
Active Member
Theres always a reason that this particular highway is special.
Northern Light
Superstar
The Park East freeway in Milwakee was removed.
The Harbor Drive freeway in Portland, Ore. was removed.
The Innerbelt freeway in Akron, Ohio was removed.
The Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx was removed.
The Oak Street Connector in New Haven was removed.
The West Sacramento Freeway was removed in Sacramento
The West Side Elevated Highway was removed in Manhattan
And there are a few more.......
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The proposed list is substantial too.
The Clairborne Expressway in New Orleans
Interstate 345 in Dallas
Interstate 35 in Deluth
Interstate 375 in Detroit
Interstate 475 in Flint, Mi
Whitehurst Freeway in Washington DC
The Skyway in Buffalo, NY
Scajaquada Expressway in Buffalo, NY
****
Note that I did not include any proposals that included tunnels or a re-routed highway, only demolition/conversion to boulevard.
milkycontent
Active Member
If you can't see that the second scenario would be better than the first, I can't help you.
nfitz
Superstar
The Syracuse one was congested enough that I have taken the ring road when it was congested.
And the ring road is longer, and takes longer, even with the higher speed limit - so I'd go through downtown if it wasn't congested.
Ward8
Active Member
I had to quit this thread a while back because the response to this will be that anything that isn't a perfect copy of the gardiner is such a wildly different example that it's useless to even discuss. It's aways something about the transit being too different or the population being too big to get rid of the highway, or too small to be like NYC. It's truly the goldilocks highway. I wanted to check in after the election to see if there was anything new to discuss...
Hopefully with Chow in office we will at least get an accurate picture of the accounting from city staff.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
West Side Elevated is a pretty similar example now that I think about it in some context, but it’s also on Manhattan and was an extremely dangerous highway with insanely poor design standards since it was built in the 1920’s when modern cars basically didn’t exist. Manhattan still has FDR drive on the east side as well.
Most of the other examples are small highways or stub route removals.
The Sheridan expressway has a duplicate corridor a couple hundred metres to the east.
Park East in Milwaukee was a stub route intended to connect to another highway which was cancelled.
The Akron inner belt was a stub route leading to a downtown of a city which has shrunk massively since it’s peak and was severely overbuilt.
The Portland harbour drive highway has duplicate corridors a few hundred metres both to the east and west.
The Oak Street connector in New Haven was a stub route going nowhere.
The west Sacramento freeway was a stub route going into downtown immediately beside a through freeway.
Most of the other examples are small highways or stub route removals.
The Sheridan expressway has a duplicate corridor a couple hundred metres to the east.
Park East in Milwaukee was a stub route intended to connect to another highway which was cancelled.
The Akron inner belt was a stub route leading to a downtown of a city which has shrunk massively since it’s peak and was severely overbuilt.
The Portland harbour drive highway has duplicate corridors a few hundred metres both to the east and west.
The Oak Street connector in New Haven was a stub route going nowhere.
The west Sacramento freeway was a stub route going into downtown immediately beside a through freeway.
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EnviroTO
Senior Member
The number of people needing to go to the core is only going to go up, more people live there and there is an ever increasing density of attractions. The Gardiner is not a sustainable solution because as the population grows it's capacity cannot be extended so it gets into gridlock and it's gridlock backs up onto local streets.
The local streets are the streets actually needed to be functional so buses can operate, people can cross the street, etc but they are blocked up with people going to or from the suburbs. The local streets can't be widened so in order to allow locals to make local trips lanes are taken off the road for cyclists and transit making there less places for people coming off the freeway to go.
The downtown parking lots are disappearing replaced by development, there are less lanes for cars on local streets, there is greater population than ever. Where is the Gardiner going to take people?
The local streets are the streets actually needed to be functional so buses can operate, people can cross the street, etc but they are blocked up with people going to or from the suburbs. The local streets can't be widened so in order to allow locals to make local trips lanes are taken off the road for cyclists and transit making there less places for people coming off the freeway to go.
The downtown parking lots are disappearing replaced by development, there are less lanes for cars on local streets, there is greater population than ever. Where is the Gardiner going to take people?
Amare
Senior Member
All of what you're saying is true, which is why the Gardiner serves as an alternative route to help alleviate pressures on surrounding roads which helps our local arterials function. Remove the whole things (or a big chunk) and that problem gets significantly worse. No matter if we like it or not, it will always serve as a critical link which connects our city together.
I always point to my example: just take a look at how the streets are in Toronto when the Gardiner is shut down for the weekend. Arterials all over the city are clogged out of their minds. Arterial roads such as:
-Lake Shore Blvd
-The Queensway
-Bloor St/Danforth Ave
-King St
-Richmond/Adelaide
-Queens Quay
-Front St
-Dundas St
-Queen St
It's really not feasible to tear it down, because even as you mentioned our population is only growing so there will be an increasing dependence on it. This is not just for personal commuting by the way. Trucks use it for deliveries of: construction materials, commercial/industrial goods, raw material transport, etc. So unless people enjoy seeing those things on their local streets (many of which cant accommodate that due to narrow lane widths in the downtown core) it would be extremely foolish to remove significant portions of the Gardiner.
And I havent even touched on things like CafeTO, and the efforts to have pedestrian corridors in the city which further limit road capacity in the city.
EnviroTO
Senior Member
But this is not something that can work. It can't possibly work because the surface streets are not designed in a "get people to the freeway with minimal local impact" manner. There are simply not enough ways to get onto the Gardiner from points around downtown, so people going north head south to the Gardiner on a few roads, people going east head south to the Gardiner on a few roads, and people going west head south to the Gardiner on a few roads. Without the freeway people going north go north on many roads, people going east head east on many roads, and people going west head west on many roads. If the goal was to create a freeway that wouldn't create bottlenecks on the local streets the freeway would run diagonal to the street grid and have as many ramps as possible, but that isn't going to get built... instead there is a bottleneck that ensures gridlock on local streets.