It gets shut down a couple of times a year for maintenance and events. That's on weekends, and it definitely has an impact on Lake Shore traffic.
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This:
For perspective, I'm curious what other issues you see with the alignment.
Well let's see:
- The tunnel entrance at Clarence square would basically turn the entire area into a tunnel portal. See the parking entrance at University/Yonge&Front, or the streetcar entrances at Spadina station or Queens Quay as a sample of what that would look like. That would be a hard sell especially considering that it would be for 'motorists' and not 'transit'. Then the tunnel passes very close to the foundations of the condo development at spadina and front (fly?), and under the Toyota dealership on Front which is slated for a redevelopment project of it's own. Finally the tunnel must somehow pop out of the retaining wall by the rail tracks at a height high enough to allow train operation below.
- The ramp to Front then has divert from tunnel roadway and rise up quickly enough to meet Spadina&Front, which is an already congested intersection.
- Punte de luz I've already mentioned, however. I just can't see how you plan to pass the Gardiner under the bridge. judging from this photo: there isn't very much clearance under the bridge. Given that the GO locomotive is what 5m high I'd estimate that there is about 10m of clearance below the bridge. Ontario highway act requires any clearance below 4.4m be marked with a sign to warn truckers, going by that measurement as a minimum clearance plus roughly 2m for the roadway, subsurface, and support structures puts you at less than 3M above the tracks, you may as well raise the ground at that point rather than bother with a bridge structure. I know you think you can get around this by closing the Bathurst yard and removing rail operations below, I don't think that's possible to do plus have the ramps with acceptable curve radii (both vertically and horizontally) you'd have to move the roadway south slightly and that impacts the rail operations.
- The plan is very similar to the TO Viaduct proposal that pops up from time to time and like that the criticism is that you take 2 barriers to the lake (rail tracks and the gardiner) and make one super barrier by stacking them vertically. No matter how pretty you make it, it will still be a huge visual and psychological barrier.
It gets shut down a couple of times a year for maintenance and events. That's on weekends, and it definitely has an impact on Lake Shore traffic.
Before a final call is made, we should close the stretch in question down for a period of time, from a week to a month, to see once and for all what not having a Gardiner would be like on our transportation network. While it might not provide an exact prediction as Lake Shore would be widened and (hopefully) we would have better transit, it would give us an idea of just how prepared the current road and transit infrastructure is to handle the removal of this highway section.
Well let's see:
- The tunnel entrance at Clarence square would basically turn the entire area into a tunnel portal. See the parking entrance at University/Yonge&Front, or the streetcar entrances at Spadina station or Queens Quay as a sample of what that would look like. That would be a hard sell especially considering that it would be for 'motorists' and not 'transit'. Then the tunnel passes very close to the foundations of the condo development at spadina and front (fly?), and under the Toyota dealership on Front which is slated for a redevelopment project of it's own. Finally the tunnel must somehow pop out of the retaining wall by the rail tracks at a height high enough to allow train operation below.
- The ramp to Front then has divert from tunnel roadway and rise up quickly enough to meet Spadina&Front, which is an already congested intersection.
- Punte de luz I've already mentioned, however. I just can't see how you plan to pass the Gardiner under the bridge. judging from this photo: there isn't very much clearance under the bridge. Given that the GO locomotive is what 5m high I'd estimate that there is about 10m of clearance below the bridge.
Ontario highway act requires any clearance below 4.4m be marked with a sign to warn truckers, going by that measurement as a minimum clearance plus roughly 2m for the roadway, subsurface, and support structures puts you at less than 3M above the tracks, you may as well raise the ground at that point rather than bother with a bridge structure.
I know you think you can get around this by closing the Bathurst yard and removing rail operations below, I don't think that's possible to do plus have the ramps with acceptable curve radii (both vertically and horizontally) you'd have to move the roadway south slightly and that impacts the rail operations.
- The plan is very similar to the TO Viaduct proposal that pops up from time to time and like that the criticism is that you take 2 barriers to the lake (rail tracks and the gardiner) and make one super barrier by stacking them vertically. No matter how pretty you make it, it will still be a huge visual and psychological barrier.
Meant to ask............Where do all the potential mayors {including Ford} stand on the issue of the Gardiner?
Even those who think it's just fine the way it is will still have to state how they are going to come up with the money to fix it. That's the one good thing about the Gardiner being ready to fall over...the city can't keep pushing the issue down the road to the next election or council. The time for talk really is at an end as there is no time to lose before they will have to shut it down due to safety concerns.
Any answers to my question or are all the potential mayors mum on the subject?
In response to the argument of keeping or tearing down the Gardiner, I can only say, are you nuts? Tearing it down is THE worst thing the city could do to make an already frustrating and time consuming commute even worse. While I fully understand and agree with the other side of the coin, in no way, shape, or form, should we allow one of the main arteries of the core to be demolished. Any major city is a living, breathing organism, with it's highways and roads, it's arteries and veins. Much like in biology, removing a major artery can be fatal, regardless of what the stats may say.
While, in time, we are becoming a city of downtown dwellers, we are still dependant on our cars, and to cut the key source into and out of the core is suicide. Had I had things my way, I'd take it a step further. Like everything else in our city, it should be made taller, by that, I mean, instead of just repairing it, improve it by adding a second road deck. Make the existing deck for eastbound, and the new top deck, for westbound, at the same time, as is the case in many cities like Washington DC, add the subway to the middle of the lower road deck, and run it the entire length of the Gardiner starting Marina Del Ray all the way east to the DVP and north up to the 401. Sound crazy? Not really. Think about it, we desperately need more available lanes to handle the increase in traffic on both highways, and we need to build the downtown relief line, which, instead of tunnelling at great cost, could be added to the new road deck at a much lower cost. It is the ideal answer for everyone's commuting woes, and although costly to build, it would save hundreds of millions in lost productivity of people that would other wise be stuck in traffic, or trying to squeeze onto an over crowded train, just a though..
In response to the argument of keeping or tearing down the Gardiner, I can only say, are you nuts? Tearing it down is THE worst thing the city could do to make an already frustrating and time consuming commute even worse. While I fully understand and agree with the other side of the coin, in no way, shape, or form, should we allow one of the main arteries of the core to be demolished. Any major city is a living, breathing organism, with it's highways and roads, it's arteries and veins. Much like in biology, removing a major artery can be fatal, regardless of what the stats may say.
While, in time, we are becoming a city of downtown dwellers, we are still dependant on our cars, and to cut the key source into and out of the core is suicide. Had I had things my way, I'd take it a step further. Like everything else in our city, it should be made taller, by that, I mean, instead of just repairing it, improve it by adding a second road deck. Make the existing deck for eastbound, and the new top deck, for westbound, at the same time, as is the case in many cities like Washington DC, add the subway to the middle of the lower road deck, and run it the entire length of the Gardiner starting Marina Del Ray all the way east to the DVP and north up to the 401. Sound crazy? Not really. Think about it, we desperately need more available lanes to handle the increase in traffic on both highways, and we need to build the downtown relief line, which, instead of tunnelling at great cost, could be added to the new road deck at a much lower cost. It is the ideal answer for everyone's commuting woes, and although costly to build, it would save hundreds of millions in lost productivity of people that would other wise be stuck in traffic, or trying to squeeze onto an over crowded train, just a though..
Do you work for Chris Christie? Traffic modelling can easily show the impact without subjecting people to a fake shutdown that would not replicate the proposed 8-lane boulevard. Shutting down this stretch of highway and requiring all traffic to exit Jarvis (eastbound) or Lakeshore (from DVP) on one-lane ramps down to a 6-lane road (Lakeshore) without proper signal coordination on the lights would create a far bigger traffic problem than the proposed boulevard.
There is an old saying, "All research is bullshit." I am not saying that a temporary closure would create an identical scenario of what it would be like, but it would help to confirm the models and perhaps identify issues overlooked by planners.
On an infrastructure change as radical as this, the least we can do is get a real world idea of how Richmond and Adelaide will be able to handle the extra vehicle traffic heading into the city centre.
In other words, you don't believe in science. What you propose is not a real world idea. Requiring all traffic to exit from either direction on one lane off ramps would be completely different from what is proposed and would not give us any sense of what the new proposal will achieve. You would be closer to reality if you just put up 4 sets of traffic lights on the Eastern Gardiner. No, I am not suggesting that.
In response to the argument of keeping or tearing down the Gardiner, I can only say, are you nuts? Tearing it down is THE worst thing the city could do to make an already frustrating and time consuming commute even worse. While I fully understand and agree with the other side of the coin, in no way, shape, or form, should we allow one of the main arteries of the core to be demolished. Any major city is a living, breathing organism, with it's highways and roads, it's arteries and veins. Much like in biology, removing a major artery can be fatal, regardless of what the stats may say.
While, in time, we are becoming a city of downtown dwellers, we are still dependant on our cars, and to cut the key source into and out of the core is suicide. Had I had things my way, I'd take it a step further. Like everything else in our city, it should be made taller, by that, I mean, instead of just repairing it, improve it by adding a second road deck. Make the existing deck for eastbound, and the new top deck, for westbound, at the same time, as is the case in many cities like Washington DC, add the subway to the middle of the lower road deck, and run it the entire length of the Gardiner starting Marina Del Ray all the way east to the DVP and north up to the 401. Sound crazy? Not really. Think about it, we desperately need more available lanes to handle the increase in traffic on both highways, and we need to build the downtown relief line, which, instead of tunnelling at great cost, could be added to the new road deck at a much lower cost. It is the ideal answer for everyone's commuting woes, and although costly to build, it would save hundreds of millions in lost productivity of people that would other wise be stuck in traffic, or trying to squeeze onto an over crowded train, just a though..