It gets shut down a couple of times a year for maintenance and events. That's on weekends, and it definitely has an impact on Lake Shore traffic.
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Woodbridge_Heights
Senior Member
Well let's see:
- The tunnel entrance at Clarence square would basically turn the entire area into a tunnel portal. See the parking entrance at University/Yonge&Front, or the streetcar entrances at Spadina station or Queens Quay as a sample of what that would look like. That would be a hard sell especially considering that it would be for 'motorists' and not 'transit'. Then the tunnel passes very close to the foundations of the condo development at spadina and front (fly?), and under the Toyota dealership on Front which is slated for a redevelopment project of it's own. Finally the tunnel must somehow pop out of the retaining wall by the rail tracks at a height high enough to allow train operation below.
- The ramp to Front then has divert from tunnel roadway and rise up quickly enough to meet Spadina&Front, which is an already congested intersection.
- Punte de luz I've already mentioned, however. I just can't see how you plan to pass the Gardiner under the bridge. judging from this photo: there isn't very much clearance under the bridge. Given that the GO locomotive is what 5m high I'd estimate that there is about 10m of clearance below the bridge. Ontario highway act requires any clearance below 4.4m be marked with a sign to warn truckers, going by that measurement as a minimum clearance plus roughly 2m for the roadway, subsurface, and support structures puts you at less than 3M above the tracks, you may as well raise the ground at that point rather than bother with a bridge structure. I know you think you can get around this by closing the Bathurst yard and removing rail operations below, I don't think that's possible to do plus have the ramps with acceptable curve radii (both vertically and horizontally) you'd have to move the roadway south slightly and that impacts the rail operations.
- The plan is very similar to the TO Viaduct proposal that pops up from time to time and like that the criticism is that you take 2 barriers to the lake (rail tracks and the gardiner) and make one super barrier by stacking them vertically. No matter how pretty you make it, it will still be a huge visual and psychological barrier.
Tuscani01
Senior Member
You can't build ANYTHING under Puente De Luz. GO required PDL to be at that height in order to maintain signal sight lines for train operators. Any potential ramp/highway would need to be built above PDL, or at the same height.
rbt
Senior Member
Those shutdowns are much broader than the specific section being looked at.
Grimace
Active Member
Do you work for Chris Christie? Traffic modelling can easily show the impact without subjecting people to a fake shutdown that would not replicate the proposed 8-lane boulevard. Shutting down this stretch of highway and requiring all traffic to exit Jarvis (eastbound) or Lakeshore (from DVP) on one-lane ramps down to a 6-lane road (Lakeshore) without proper signal coordination on the lights would create a far bigger traffic problem than the proposed boulevard.
dunkalunk
Senior Member
There won't be any train operation below. The tunnel could pop out at ground level. Once the yard is removed, you have about 40m to play with, which is more than enough to carry 5 lanes of traffic.
I'm not familiar with development in the area and will need to look up some more info. If need be, you could run the tunnel directly beneath the Front/Spadina intersection.
Before anything can be done with the Gardiner, we're going to have to invest something like $10 Billion to improve transit through downtown. Of course there will be NIMBYs, there are always NIMBYs. People who live by Clarence Square will be at most a one block away from a subway station and streetcar line. I think they can deal with living next to a few tunnels that actually go somewhere and isn't just storage for cars.
The alternative here is to use up ground real estate to bring 3 lanes of Wellington to the intersection of Front and Spadina, and we all know how much of a mess that intersection is.
During rush hour, pretty much every North-South road with access to the Gardiner is congested. Front and Spadina is congested because the Gardiner has offramps directing traffic directly at Front and Spadina. I don't see how ending ramps at the intersection with would be any worse than the current situation.
You're right here.
That's pretty much the idea. The bridge structure would end on an embankment before Puente de Luz. The rest would be at-grade to Spadina.
Horizontal radii should not be an issue. The Dan Leckie Way ramps would continue close to the same elevation as the bridge structure and be supported by cables until they turn to cross the rail corridor. There would also be sufficient clearance beneath them for GO's continued operations. Heck, to save money you can probably get away with not building them.
Grade is another issue. I don't know what the elevation is at the top of the Bathurst Bridge, nor at the deck of Puente de Luz. The distance between the two is 280m. The grade looks to be somewhere around 4-5%, which means traffic would need to be slowed down to 70-80km/h as it approached Bathurst which can easily be done by narrowing the right of way and lowering the median.
But you'll have one less huge visual and psychological barrier which also happens to free up land for development adjacent to a dark 6 lane road that runs beneath it. Surely this is better than status quo in the long term.
I actually modelled this more after the often proposed but never built Front Street Extension which essentially acted as extended ramps to the Gardiner. Building it would have ruined much of the development potential on Front between Bathurst and Spadina and caused a traffic nightmare at the Bathurst Street Bridge. To avoid this, I purposefully extended ramps to access Front and Wellington. In 20 years' time when tearing down the Western Gardiner, it may be one of the few options left available. It does have elements of the Gardiner Viaduct, but it doesn't attempt to opeate a 10-lane expressway 50m off the ground with ramps flying everywhere. That's just nuts. The idea is to be minimally invasive to the existing urban fabric while still providing a reasonable travel route into the financial district.
ssiguy2
Senior Member
Any answers to my question or are all the potential mayors mum on the subject?
W. K. Lis
Superstar
Maybe they are actually reading the reports. (Except for one mayoralty candidate, of course.)
Hanlansboy
Active Member
In response to the argument of keeping or tearing down the Gardiner, I can only say, are you nuts? Tearing it down is THE worst thing the city could do to make an already frustrating and time consuming commute even worse. While I fully understand and agree with the other side of the coin, in no way, shape, or form, should we allow one of the main arteries of the core to be demolished. Any major city is a living, breathing organism, with it's highways and roads, it's arteries and veins. Much like in biology, removing a major artery can be fatal, regardless of what the stats may say.
While, in time, we are becoming a city of downtown dwellers, we are still dependant on our cars, and to cut the key source into and out of the core is suicide. Had I had things my way, I'd take it a step further. Like everything else in our city, it should be made taller, by that, I mean, instead of just repairing it, improve it by adding a second road deck. Make the existing deck for eastbound, and the new top deck, for westbound, at the same time, as is the case in many cities like Washington DC, add the subway to the middle of the lower road deck, and run it the entire length of the Gardiner starting Marina Del Ray all the way east to the DVP and north up to the 401. Sound crazy? Not really. Think about it, we desperately need more available lanes to handle the increase in traffic on both highways, and we need to build the downtown relief line, which, instead of tunnelling at great cost, could be added to the new road deck at a much lower cost. It is the ideal answer for everyone's commuting woes, and although costly to build, it would save hundreds of millions in lost productivity of people that would other wise be stuck in traffic, or trying to squeeze onto an over crowded train, just a though..
While, in time, we are becoming a city of downtown dwellers, we are still dependant on our cars, and to cut the key source into and out of the core is suicide. Had I had things my way, I'd take it a step further. Like everything else in our city, it should be made taller, by that, I mean, instead of just repairing it, improve it by adding a second road deck. Make the existing deck for eastbound, and the new top deck, for westbound, at the same time, as is the case in many cities like Washington DC, add the subway to the middle of the lower road deck, and run it the entire length of the Gardiner starting Marina Del Ray all the way east to the DVP and north up to the 401. Sound crazy? Not really. Think about it, we desperately need more available lanes to handle the increase in traffic on both highways, and we need to build the downtown relief line, which, instead of tunnelling at great cost, could be added to the new road deck at a much lower cost. It is the ideal answer for everyone's commuting woes, and although costly to build, it would save hundreds of millions in lost productivity of people that would other wise be stuck in traffic, or trying to squeeze onto an over crowded train, just a though..
ehlow
Senior Member
Why not double deck the 401 and run subways on it as well? Hey, the Yonge subway is at capacity. Let's build a double decker highway with an 3rd deck for express subways right above it!
I've seen the future..
junctionist
Senior Member
A highway is not an artery. That's just a metaphor if you assume that there's no other way to get around a city besides driving. When you add enough rapid transit to move hundreds of thousands more people into the downtown core without cars, it's redundant.
Electrify
Senior Member
There is an old saying, "All research is bullshit." I am not saying that a temporary closure would create an identical scenario of what it would be like, but it would help to confirm the models and perhaps identify issues overlooked by planners.
On an infrastructure change as radical as this, the least we can do is get a real world idea of how Richmond and Adelaide will be able to handle the extra vehicle traffic heading into the city centre.
Grimace
Active Member
In other words, you don't believe in science. What you propose is not a real world idea. Requiring all traffic to exit from either direction on one lane off ramps would be completely different from what is proposed and would not give us any sense of what the new proposal will achieve. You would be closer to reality if you just put up 4 sets of traffic lights on the Eastern Gardiner. No, I am not suggesting that.
sixrings
Senior Member
"All research is bullshit" gives people a cop out when they dont like the results. They can just use a conspiracy theory to explain why the data shows it a different way then they think. When we had a liberal mayor I can see how someone could think that maybe they started the research with a bias against cars. But now we have a pro car anti pinko mayor. Every mayoral candidate so far is also conservative and pro car. The deputy mayor is conservative. It sure seems like other then Adam Vaughan and potential mayoral candidate Chow that we live in a very conservative pro car world. Yet despite this of course someone hacked the data to make it look like cars are evil. Cause that makes a whole lot of sense. Conspiracy theorists at least be consistent in the crap that you speak.
Grimace
Active Member
You realize that we are only talking about a 2.4 km stretch, and that it isn't busy, even during rush hour, other than back-up in the PM from the downtown core heading westbound?
A single GO train holds 2000 people. In the AM peak, the Eastern Gardiner has 1200 cars per hour eastbound and 4500 cars westbound. So, less than a GO train eastbound and probably about 3 GO trains worth of people eastbound (all of whom, by the way, sail through this 2.4 km stretch with no congestion). It is a tiny part of Toronto's total commuters.
GO and TTC make up 68% of all downtown commuters. the Gardiner as a whole is only 7%, and the Eastern Gardiner is only 3%. Their importance is greatly overestimated.