I am far more familiar with the west end commute patterns but, I presume, there must be similar alternatives in the east....and every time I see those numbers I wonder if they aren't just a bit glib and produced with a specific intent/agenda in mind. It really is difficult in rush hour to look at the cars on the Gardiner combined with the Lake Shore and not wonder what would the situation be like if the Gardiner did not exist.
Not saying there is no other, viable, alternative, plan, but when someone says only 4% (like that graphic does) it seems to be used to say that only 4% are affected...and I do not think that is the case at all.
The graphic is a bit misleading, as are people that post it to disingenuously claim the Gardiner carries such a small percentage of commuters. The graphic is showing commuters
TO downtown, not
THROUGH downtown. Yes only 7% take the Gardiner into downtown in the AM peak, and I'm actually glad for that. And I'm also glad that there's a grade-separated highway to carry tens of thousands of drivers across downtown to areas beyond
without using the downtown surface network - interfering with transit, cyclists, pedestrians, and the downtown's overall wellbeing in the process.
Another issue that's misleading in the debate are the costs used. When do we ever see 100-year lifecycle costs brought to any debate? We don't. If we saw 100-year lifecycle costs for any subway project - like say tunneling below uninhabited farm fields, highways, industrial lots, or big box land in York Region - would people still support it? I'm sure
some would, but level-headed people would become a helluva lot more skeptical. As they should. But we don't see that, and we'd be lucky to see 25yr costs. In other words not a
century.
As much as people hate the Gardiner, there are few things that we know and are obvious. 1. Elevated highways in TO don't really hinder development or property values. 2. What's being built isn't a new highway, it's an improvement of an existing highway - and this improvement is for everyone's benefit: peds, cyclists, development, etc. 3. We're maintaining a critical link between the DVP and Gardiner, which will invariably help keep non-downtown-bound commuters off the surface network. 4. An elevated highway is actually pretty damn urban (can't think of anywhere else in the prov that has such a thing).
What I'd like to see are people questioning places like York Region for pushing projects like Highway 413, or a Highway 427 extension. People think 2km of narrow
elevated highway is bad and un-urban, then what about 200m wide surface highways through countryside that serves little other purpose than to promote more auto-oriented sprawl? We're helping to pay for some of the last vestiges of greenspace in the GTA to be swallowed up, but let's ignore that and focus on the improvement of 2km of existing highway.
