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Roads: Gardiner Expressway

andrewpmk said:
City council is nuts to even consider demolishing a major highway and replacing it with severe traffic congestion on Lake Shore, for not very much cost savings (compared to the cost of GO expansion, the downtown relief line and new streetcar lines which is required to achieve the claimed levels of delay in the study, which would cost orders of magnitude more).

Does city council realize that there are hundreds of GO buses a day that use the Gardiner to go into downtown Toronto? Even those which come from the west and do not use the eastern section of the Gardiner will be negatively affected by this, thanks to the massive traffic jam we are likely to see on eastbound Gardiner before Jarvis and southbound DVP before Lake Shore at newly installed traffic lights. Metrolinx will not be at all happy about this proposal.
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Those buses are going to disappear once GO RER comes.
 
howl said:
This is an important concept, and may be the reason why the current expressway-user numbers don't matter.

Given a choice people will always drive until congestion levels get so high it's quicker to take transit. Therefore the ratio of drivers-to-transit-users for people with a choice is determined by the capacity of the roads versus the robustness of the transit system as much as anything else. If you increase the road capacity you don't end congestion - you just get more people driving and fewer people taking transit. Conversely, if you reduce road capacity you end up with the same congestion, but more transit users and fewer cars in the downtown. That is assuming of course your transit system has the capacity to take the extra people. Therefore there are strong environmental and social arguments to be made for reducing road capacity and increasing transit capacity.

When Tory says it's going to take commuters an extra ten minutes to get downtown, what he is really saying is there will be more people on the transit system and fewer driving since that ten minutes extra driving time will convince a lot of people to take transit instead.
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The people who are driving downtown now are probably only doing so because they have no other choice. Transit takes significantly longer or they need a vehicle for their job. Removing a highway only increases their commute time and decreases their quality of life.

The highway should only come down after the necessary transit is upgraded (GO RER, Smart Track, DRL, etc.).
 
WILDCARDS (14 votes in three categories)
UNDECIDED (9 votes)

John Campbell
Giorgio Mammoliti
Anthony Perruzza
Michael Thompson
Glenn De Baeremaeker
Jim Karygiannis
Chin Lee
Raymond Cho
Ron Moeser

NO RESPONSE (4 votes)

Mark Grimes
Josh Colle
John Filion
David Shiner

MAINTAIN (1 vote)

Rob Ford
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My take on how the vote will break down.

Remove - 16+6=22
Hybrid - 15+7=22

So if I am right Rob Ford has the deciding vote.
 
Back in 2004, a master transit EA plan was developed for the Whole Waterfront From Bay St to Leslie St.

It looked at various types of service from buses to monorail.

Buses and LRT remain as the choice of service due ridership.

After this Master Transit Plan was approved by TTC Commissioners and the City of Toronto Council, it was sent for approval.

During the approval stage, TTC was requested to break the Master plan into 3 plans. TTC unknowing to me and most people who wrote the EA, made the biggest mistake they could do and it was the removal of the Lake Shore LRT running from Woodbine Ave to Bay St. Anything west of Bay was to be in another EA. Stops would been at Leslie, Don Way, Cherry St, Jarvis, Yonge and Bay.

We only learn of the removal when we started the Cherry St and the Queens Quay EA. It needs to be put back in the plan and happen during the removal stage of being built.

The removal will win by 1 vote at the end of the day as its the right thing to do.

The needs of the many out weight the few. With less than 3% of drivers using this out dated thing, here she comes down.

If Ford is smart which not the case, he will vote for the Hybrid.
 
So the Tory announcement on carding probably means Thompson, Lee and Burnside will go for the hybrid option.

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I think the big issue with the Hybrid will be the immediate lawsuit from the 3C group, and as the article points out, the issues with the province and the environmental assessment.

The Eastern Gardiner is within Environmental Minister Glen Murray's riding and there is huge local support for the tear-down option.
 
arcum said:
The people who are driving downtown now are probably only doing so because they have no other choice. Transit takes significantly longer or they need a vehicle for their job. Removing a highway only increases their commute time and decreases their quality of life.

The highway should only come down after the necessary transit is upgraded (GO RER, Smart Track, DRL, etc.).
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I agree with you about the transit upgrade timing.

However, the number of people who don't have a choice about driving downtown is relatively small, probably miniscule. Just about everybody can drive to a GO station. Getting those "choice" drivers off the road frees up space for people who actually require their cars.
 
WislaHD said:
So the Tory announcement on carding probably means Thompson, Lee and Burnside will go for the hybrid option.

---

I think the big issue with the Hybrid will be the immediate lawsuit from the 3C group, and as the article points out, the issues with the province and the environmental assessment.

The Eastern Gardiner is within Environmental Minister Glen Murray's riding and there is huge local support for the tear-down option.
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Cynical politics smh...
 
LNahid2000 said:
Those buses are going to disappear once GO RER comes.
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The Milton line ones certainly are not since that line is not being electrified (those ones will be affected by the eastbound traffic jam just before Jarvis). The Richmond Hill line also will not be electrified.

My guess is that Metrolinx will start running buses to other parts of the GTA that don't have GO train service to replace the service that is replaced with trains. Metrolinx must be planning to build a new GO bus terminal in the new office tower near the Air Canada Centre for a reason. Plus there are many intercity buses that currently use the Bay and Dundas terminal that may be moved there.

City Council is very good at repeatedly making terrible decisions about transportation in Toronto. Demolish a major expressway to save $100 million but you will need $5 billion for the DRL and over $10 billion for GO electrification to reduce the severe traffic congestion this will cause.
 
andrewpmk said:
City Council is very good at repeatedly making terrible decisions about transportation in Toronto. Demolish a major expressway to save $100 million but you will need $5 billion for the DRL and over $10 billion for GO electrification to reduce the severe traffic congestion this will cause.
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A DRL and GO Electrification is needed regardless of whether an expressway that serves less than 3% of rush hour commuters is torn down or not.
 
For the Remove calculations, does anyone know what transit was supposed to be in place? Example, for the DRL was it just the "Phase One" section from St Andrew to Pape (i.e what the City is hoping for); or did it include the complete DRTES DRL from Dundas West to Don Mills/Eglinton (i.e not happenin)?

And for RER, did the study calculate all the GO lines being electrified with 15min frequencies? Because as mentioned above, GO Richmond Hill isn't receiving any upgrades.
 
arcum said:
The hybrid option is somewhat unclear regarding the actual lane configuration. It proposes to maintain the DVP ramps, but at the same time move the ramps to Lakeshore. This can't really work if the existing piers are maintained, or at least I have not seen any detailed design plans.

http://www.gardinereast.ca/sites/default/files//documents/Backgrounder for Gardiner EA -- Hybrid.pdf

A vehicle type breakdown is also unavailable, you might have better luck contacting the Gardiner east team. Based on the presentation material available, Waterfront Toronto is cherry picking to data to make it sound like only 5,200 vehicles will be affected in the AM peak hour, understating the true traffic impacts.

I'm really surprised council will have to make the decision based on such limited data.

Based on the UofT report that paints a grimmer picture than the Waterfront Toronto presentation, there are about 9% trucks which is about the norm for 400 series highways.
http://www.cp24.com/polopoly_fs/1.2363519!/httpFile/file.pdf

Steve Munro has a pretty good writeup: http://stevemunro.ca/2015/05/11/gardiner-east-conundrum/
When comparing the Waterfront Toronto traffic data from last year's analysis to this years:
Where the Remove (Boulevard) option was 10 minutes higher than the Maintain option in 2014, this difference has been wrestled down to only 3 minutes through design changes. This is rather difficult to believe given the relatively small portion of the Gardiner East that has been “tweaked†in 2015, and the study authors would have done well to explain this in greater detail. Their failure to do so, as in the 2014 report’s lack of detail, undermines the credibility of the Boulevard option.
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Ah, interesting. Thanks for this.
 
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