Toronto Lower Simcoe Ramp | ?m | ?s | City of Toronto

There is another serious downside to using weathering steels such as Corten, however.

It has been found that it can't be used in cases where the steel sees a lot of multi-axis bending movements. Pullman Standard attempted to use it on a number of railcars in the 1930s and 1940s and found that it actually fared worse than their regular high-carbon structural steel that they used in the railcars at the time.

Not that bridges are normally susceptible to the kinds of motion that a railcar is, of course....

Dan
Toronto, Ont.

the welds are not corrosion resistant so they need regular maintenance. But overall Corten doesn't need as much maintenance as painted steel
There is a lot of bleeding with Corten as well. If they use it there needs to be cleaning of the supports/roads regularly until it completely rusts.
 
They put up another section today. (update: Just uploaded a new pic)
And in the park, the start digging a large trench that follows old ramp alignment. Makes me think that they are just removing contaminated soil.

20170613_210435.jpg
 

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the welds are not corrosion resistant so they need regular maintenance. But overall Corten doesn't need as much maintenance as painted steel
There is a lot of bleeding with Corten as well. If they use it there needs to be cleaning of the supports/roads regularly until it completely rusts.
The weld material has similar Chromium and Nickel and thus also acts as weathering steel.
Bleeding is a problem that is best solved by managing the moisture and water on the girder. Either the water is deflected off the girder to it drop to the ground before reaching the concrete pier, or the pier has a bit of a moat around the perimeter so that water can be channeled to a drain (often inside the pier) instead of running down the face..
 
Working at 1 York Street, I've been fortunate (or some might say unfortunate) to witness/suffer the tear down of the York Street/Harbour Street ramps up close and personal for the past two months. But now that the ramps are a thing of the past, I sometimes struggle to remember what the streetscape was like before they came down. So I looked up some earlier photos that I had taken back in mid April and mid May of the ramp sections nearest to my office building, and I thought I'd share them with the readers of this forum. The "after" pictures were taken this week. It's quite remarkable to see the stark contrasts between the "before" and "after" images from roughly the same vantage points...

This is set 1 of 3:

BEFORE


AFTER


BEFORE

AFTER


BEFORE


AFTER


BEFORE


AFTER


BEFORE


AFTER
 
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The important thing to note is that this is merely a relatively narrow off-ramp (two lanes). Gardiner is 6+. Removal of the latter (as fanciful as it maybe) would have a much greater impact.

AoD
 
Never underestimate the impact of psychology on urban design - nobody is complaining that Champs-Élysées is 10 lanes wide.

Nobody complains about University Avenue either, but neither University nor the Champs Elysees have a 70 kph speed limit and need to move 100,000-150,000 cars per day. And Lake Shore isn't going to have a 75 meter ROW where the road only takes up 25 meters.
 
Nobody complains about University Avenue either, but neither University nor the Champs Elysees have a 70 kph speed limit and need to move 100,000-150,000 cars per day. And Lake Shore isn't going to have a 75 meter ROW where the road only takes up 25 meters.

Sure, if you treat the capacity as an inviolate. I don't.

AoD
 
Sure, if you treat the capacity as an inviolate. I don't.

Do you expect 100,000 people per day to simply say "I won't go downtown", which hurts the businesses in the area? Or do you expect them to flood onto other downtown streets, which creates more traffic and slows down streetcar service? Those are the only two alternatives, unless the subway system has room to accommodate all those people (which it doesn't).
 

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