Where has all the traffic on Spadina gone?

[hawc]

I know WHY it's gone. I want to know WHERE it's gone.

Spadina south of King on any day from 4PM on is basically one long on ramp for the Gardiner. Just bumper to bumper honking and anger. Every. Single. Day.

Ever since the Queen & Spadina intersection closure Spadina has been empty. Like totally empty. You could make it just one lane in each direction and it still wouldn't be busy. The Gardiner Westbound is still rammed though so traffic is getting on somewhere else.

Where? I wonder what street(s) have taken all the volume? And it's A LOT of volume.

I'm surprised people still aren't coming along Richmond or Adelaide or King or Front or Bremner and dumping onto Spadina. It's like if they can't get though the Queen intersection forget it. Interesting, there must have been a lot of midtown traffic coming South where I thought it was all downtown core traffic.

Anyway here's a typical pic of what it has looked like since the construction has been in progress.

^^^ Taken at 5PM

 

[CDL.TO]

Some has chosen alternate routes, some has moved to other times, and in all likelihood, a decent chunk has simply disappeared (see: induced traffic).

 

[nfitz]

I know WHY it's gone. I want to know WHERE it's gone.

Spadina south of King on any day from 4PM on is basically one long on ramp for the Gardiner. Just bumper to bumper honking and anger. Every. Single. Day.

Is that taken today? I'm not surprised that when Spadina was closed at Queen it was pretty empty (it seemed a ghost town at Dundas ... it was amazing being able to jaywalk across the red light a couple of weeks ago in the middle of the day!).

 

[ShonTron]

I just biked across Queen from Yonge to Spadina. Also amazed by the lack of traffic on Queen, even with one lane closed westbound just short of Spadina (the new streetcar island isn't complete).

 

[Monarch Butterfly]

Spadina: two big bicycle paths.

 

[spider]

A simple solution to gridlock, just close a few intersections and the traffic melts away. Who knew?

 

[reaperexpress]

A simple solution to gridlock, just close a few intersections and the traffic melts away. Who knew?

Planners and engineers have known this since at least the '70s.

That's why it's so annoying when proposals like closing King Street to through car traffic are shot down on the basis that they would increase traffic everywhere else.

 

[BurlOak]

Planners and engineers have known this since at least the '70s.

That's why it's so annoying when proposals like closing King Street to through car traffic are shot down on the basis that they would increase traffic everywhere else.

Maybe they could close King for a year while they built the DRL - oops, I noticed the word car.

Either you can close one intersection and vehicles will find an alternate route, or some people take vacation during this period.

I really think that a shallow subway could be built with a short closure (1 construction season) for much less money. This assumes that utilities are known and not a huge issue and that construction moves along in short segments at a time (almost a continuous operation) so that only a few N-S streets are blocked at any time. Even if some type of compensation is factored in for businesses along the route the money and time saved would probably be worth it.

 

[hawc]

So did the traffic all migrate over to Bathurst, Simcoe and York?

 

[k10ery]

I drove south on Bathurst at 5:15. Smooth sailing all the way to Fort York Blvd., then the usual 5-10 minute wait for the Lake Shore light.

But really the whole town seems a bit dead. People might have figured it was a good time for holiday.

 

[CDL.TO]

So did the traffic all migrate over to Bathurst, Simcoe and York?

Transportation Engineers can say with almost complete certainty... No, the traffic did not all migrate elsewhere.

 

[andrewpmk]

It is July. People are on vacation. If you haven't noticed the traffic everywhere is better than usual (except on Friday evenings and on weekends, when it is much worse due to cottage country traffic on 400, 401 and 35/115).

In September the traffic will be bad again. If this construction project were happening in September than you would expect to see huge traffic jams around the York St, Yonge St and Jarvis St ramps.

It is totally untrue that closing a road makes traffic better/building more roads makes traffic worse, as anti-car groups often claim. This is obvious whenever the DVP/Gardiner are closed for construction or Ride for Heart, all parallel routes get much more congested. Similarly Vancouver has terrible traffic for a city of its size due to its inadequate road network. It is true to some extent that people will drive more when roads are built/widened, because if traffic is bad people will avoid driving, but doubling the capacity of a road increases traffic volumes by less than 100%. Also if a road is congested a lot of people will leave earlier or later (making rush hours longer and longer) rather than avoiding it altogether.

 

[k10ery]

Transportation Engineers can say with almost complete certainty... No, the traffic did not all migrate elsewhere.

Economists, actually.

 

[TOareaFan]

So did the traffic all migrate over to Bathurst, Simcoe and York?

I would say that, considering the season, the Simcoe-Bremner-Spadina-Gardiner route has picked up some slack. It is not back up to pre summer levels but is also not down to typical mid summer levels.

 

[nfitz]

Economists, actually.

Ah good link. I've heard the theory of course, but I've never actually seen references to the original work.

It does reinforce, that the only way in a city like Toronto to improve driving commutes, is to build more rapid transit.