rbt
Senior Member
To fund about 1/10th of a subway extension. The bulk of Toronto's contribution to that extension (which was expected to be a small piece) were from debt and developer fees.
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- Thread starter Scrub
- Start date
To fund about 1/10th of a subway extension. The bulk of Toronto's contribution to that extension (which was expected to be a small piece) were from debt and developer fees.
Towered
Superstar
Good, because it's absolutely terrible.
Euphoria
Active Member
I think it's one of the better ideas on the forum. Let's hear your ideas. Thought so. Crickets...
LNahid2000
Senior Member
lol @ not even letting him respond. I wish you'd actually give up on promoting your buried highway idea since it's a waste of money.
Euphoria
Active Member
Always the same response from you: Nothing to say; nothing to add. Look, I have no problem with the idea of decking over existing Allen Road where it's below grade. I think it's absurd to think that removing or filling it in is going to do anything to relieve traffic or improve transit. Obviously no one wants the Spadina Expressway. That's orthodoxy in contemporary planning. We haven't explored tunneling expressways and combining the projects with subway construction. But I also realize people on here like to poke holes in Boston's Big Dig because of the expense. It's a kind of schadenfreude, when the reality is the Big Dig was an incredible restoration of the pre-automobile liveable city. We don't have the balls to make a bold gesture. Instead we celebrate our half-baked city building. The Under Gardiner park is the best we can hope for these days. I don't expect an underground toll highway to pay the entire capital tunneling plus subway operating costs, but I bet we could get the tunneling and stations paid for buy the investors (likely a pension fund) that pays the construction costs and collects the tolls. Again, I'm not proposing tolling existing highways, only additional tunneled ones, such as a new segment of the Allen running from Eglinton to the Gardiner underground (coupled with a subway).
LNahid2000
Senior Member
The opportunity costs of tunneling a highway are huge. We could move magnitudes of people more by public transit with the same amount of money. This is why we haven't explored your idea. This has been told to you over and over by many different people but you just keep spouting the same kind of posts. Always the same from you.
Tulse
Senior Member
So there would be no exit between Eglinton and the Gardiner? It would be a 7 km tunnel straight through? If not, where will the exit and entrance ramps be built, and how much existing infrastructure would have to be dug up in order to accommodate that?
DonValleyRainbow
Senior Member
An additional highway capacity could make that part of the trip a bit faster for automobile users, but it does not solve existing problems downstream. Downtown streets are already congested during rush hour and shoulder periods, and there is little remaining street capacity downtown relative to how much traffic a new highway could generate. Existing daily back-ups from the DVP and Gardiner are evidence of that.
A new highway can't solve downstream issues, but only add to the problem. The illusion that it can is just fantasy.
A new highway can't solve downstream issues, but only add to the problem. The illusion that it can is just fantasy.
Euphoria
Active Member
More connections are better than fewer. How many cars can be diverted away from streets in the core through a faster north-south connection between the Gardiner and the 401? The Allen is a stub in its current form. It spills out onto Eglinton, a street the City is trying to revive through measures like the Crosstown. Spreading that traffic across a few more interchanges, with simple one-lane off/on ramps, and creating a bypass west of the core, will divert some traffic from the inner city and speed up traffic flows, thereby reducing congestion and emissions. The tolls would pay for the construction and maintenance of the highway and the boring of a substantial leg of the DRL subway. Do you want to wait half a century for the second phase of the DRL? That's how long it will take without funding. We also need decking over the existing expressway. I don't know why the rail corridors through the core and the below grade stretch of the Allen don't have towers and parks above them. Once again, lack of imagination.
Tunneling and tolling the Allen south of Eglinton would provide a test case for a potential tunneled Gardiner. I stand by the idea of combining construction of the DRL with burial of the Gardiner Expressway, but that's another idea too incomprehensible to people to fly. You don't have to agree with my proposal, but don't dump on it without any better ideas to offer. I don't see why you couldn't still have a High Line type of park above the existing Allen that connects with parks to the south and the Beltline. What's so impressive about Boston's Big Dig is the lightness of the new expressway's footprint. You'd never know it's there, traffic flows so smoothly on and off of it. Burying it has opened a swath of the city for parks, squares, development, bike paths, any kind of programming. What we have now works neither for commuting, recreation, nor the environment.
Tunneling and tolling the Allen south of Eglinton would provide a test case for a potential tunneled Gardiner. I stand by the idea of combining construction of the DRL with burial of the Gardiner Expressway, but that's another idea too incomprehensible to people to fly. You don't have to agree with my proposal, but don't dump on it without any better ideas to offer. I don't see why you couldn't still have a High Line type of park above the existing Allen that connects with parks to the south and the Beltline. What's so impressive about Boston's Big Dig is the lightness of the new expressway's footprint. You'd never know it's there, traffic flows so smoothly on and off of it. Burying it has opened a swath of the city for parks, squares, development, bike paths, any kind of programming. What we have now works neither for commuting, recreation, nor the environment.
LNahid2000
Senior Member
You've been making these same posts for a few months now. People keep telling you why your ideas are not feasible and you just ignore everyone's feedback and say people just can't comprehend your ideas. I can't believe you seriously think we should repeat Boston's Big Dig in Toronto, when our finances are already in the gutter.
Midtown Urbanist
Superstar
Why look at Boston. Let's look at Seattle's ongoing and seemingly never-ending disaster as reason enough that we shouldn't ever consider doing something similar here.
salsa
Senior Member
Euphoria, why don't you take inspiration from cities that have not build any freeways through their centres, rather than cities that have wasted billions of dollars on underground highways that have done nothing to reduce congestion?
dunkalunk
Senior Member
While we're pipe dreaming, if Allen were removed and traffic needed to shift towards Dufferin and Bathurst, there would need to be some new ramps built. Provided weaving issues could be adequately dealt with, it's not hard to imagine ramps at Dufferin, however the area around Bathurst is very constrained. Where could one feasibly put entry/exit ramps?
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Midtown Urbanist
Superstar
Now we are talking.
Ramps on Bathurst would require significant expropriation even if they seem geometrically more doable. That is a major problem in itself.
Are we assuming that traffic would just shift towards Dufferin and Bathurst? If we filled in the Allen, it is still conceivable that it would have the same number of lanes as it does today. There would just be a lot more traffic lights. (But still not unlike many of our other N-S streets that have entry/exit ramps with the 401.)
dunkalunk
Senior Member
Continuing the pipe dream.
The Allen SB lanes are shifted to the east side of the Subway Track and meet Eglinton at a normalized intersection. The Allen continues south as a 2-lane divided road and enters a cut-and-cover tunnel North of Gloucester Grove. All of the houses on the east side of Everden Rd are demolished to make way for this spiffy new roadway and grassy-topped tunnel box. The new underground road continues east until it crosses under Glen Cedar Road where it surfaces and finds its way up the side of the ravine to the intersection of Heathdale and Bathurst, where traffic would then merrily continue south towards the core.
We just succeeded at moving the bottleneck 3km South to St.Clair and Bathurst! Sweet! How much did this cost?
This of course will probably never happen.
The Allen SB lanes are shifted to the east side of the Subway Track and meet Eglinton at a normalized intersection. The Allen continues south as a 2-lane divided road and enters a cut-and-cover tunnel North of Gloucester Grove. All of the houses on the east side of Everden Rd are demolished to make way for this spiffy new roadway and grassy-topped tunnel box. The new underground road continues east until it crosses under Glen Cedar Road where it surfaces and finds its way up the side of the ravine to the intersection of Heathdale and Bathurst, where traffic would then merrily continue south towards the core.
We just succeeded at moving the bottleneck 3km South to St.Clair and Bathurst! Sweet! How much did this cost?
This of course will probably never happen.
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