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Interesting. I've thought of that, but always gave up on it because the railway is already above ground level east of Simcoe. What did they propose?

They had a couple different options, but all of them involved rebuilding the rail corridor below grade and then building on top of it. Obviously that would be easiest between Spadina and Simcoe, but they found it was possible east of there as well. Obviously that would require the removal of the new mall they're building at Union Station. If you really want more details, I can dig it out again and try and copy stuff down. I think I've written in detail about it on the forum before, so maybe you can use the (admittedly useless) search feature and find it.



I agree with this. I used to work at Queen's Quay and Bay (Water Park Place), and the walk from the waterfront up to Union was very unfriendly. Crossing Harbour and Lakeshore was a pain - long light cycles, traffic jammed so tight that the cross-walks were blocked, inability to cross at all sides. It is a real pain. If they give the pedestrian more flexiblity and an equal priority to the cars, I think it would be much better.

Lakeshore is definitely a big part of the problem, but Lakeshore can't be fixed without fixing the Gardiner.
 
Urban parks take over downtown freeways


May 05, 2010

By Haya El Nasser

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Read More: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-05-05-urban-parks_N.htm

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Cities are removing the concrete barriers that freeways form through their downtowns — not by tearing them down but by shrouding them in greenery and turning them into parks and pedestrian-friendly developments. This gray-to-green metamorphosis is underway or under consideration in major cities seeking ways to revive sections of their downtowns from Los Angeles and Dallas to St. Louis and Cincinnati. Transportation departments are not opposed as long as the plans don't reduce highway capacity. In most cases, traffic is rerouted.

"It's the coming together of people wanting green space and realizing that highways are a negative to the city," says Peter Harnik, director of the Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence. "Covering them with green space gives you a wonderful place to live and work." Groups that are not always on the same page — environmentalists and developers — are embracing the "capping" or "decking" efforts for different reasons. Environmentalists encourage more trees and grass to offset carbon emissions and promote walkable neighborhoods to reduce reliance on cars. Developers are eager for space to build on in prime downtown locations. Citizens want parks and amenities they can reach on foot.

"Highways are extremely destructive to the fabric of urban life," says Harnik, author of Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities. "The noise that emanates from it, the smell." Capping freeways dates to the 1930s. A recent example is the Rose Kennedy Greenway over Boston's "Big Dig," which created open space by putting elevated roadways underground. The resurgence of downtowns has turned available pieces of land into hot commodities. At the same time, the drumbeat for more parks in smog-choked cities is getting louder. "It's essentially like creating oceanfront property," says Linda Owen, president of the Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation in Dallas. "It's an economic engine."

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Dallas' The Park project includes a 5-acre park on top of the Woodall Rodgers Freeway that cuts through downtown Dallas.

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In the vein of Derek Zoolander: What is this, a roadway for ants? How will this get rid of congestion when cars can't even fit in there.
 
I wonder if something like this is feasible here. I would love to see the whole Gardiner buried and paid for with tolls. Maybe we can do the rail corridor at the same time as well.
 
some differences

Burying the Gardiner or demolishing it make sense. Trying to pretend it could ever be like the High Line in NYC ignores a couple of key differences:

1. The Gardiner elevated park proposal would keep all the traffic and all the disruptive on and off ramps, unlike the High Line which is strictly a park. Under the fantasy elevated park proposal, the Gardiner would still constitute a formidable pedestrian barrier between the city and the waterfront.

2. The Gardiner elevated park would be considerably higher than the current expressway - it's a park on top of a roof. The expressway is already a lot higher than the High Line and the proposed park would be far too high for most people to even consider using it.

3. The Gardiner is an expressway that is a key part of our car-centric city. To try to pretend the thing can be greened by adding a make-believe park on top of it is to completely ignore the impact of facilitating the movement of so many cars through and into downtown.
 
Burying the Gardiner makes sense in a non-competitive funding environment. Look at the proposals from the last 10 years and look at Toronto's road repair budget. What makes more sense spending $800 million on essential road repairs or $800 million on an aestectic exercise, if no significant capacity alerations are made. Significant capacity improvements to affect peak congestion would involve doubling or more what is existing.


March 2000: Bury Gardnier from CNE to Yonge Street, estimated cost of $1.2 billion.
September 2006: Replace Gardnier with at- or below grade roads, estimated cost $1.475 billion.
September 2006: Removing the Gardiner east of Spadina, and widen Lake Shore, estimated cost $758 million.
May 2008: Demolish Gardnier from Jarvis Street to the Don River and widen Lake Shore (like University Ave), estimated cost $2-300 million
June 2009: 'Green Ribbon' for 7km, estimated cost $5-800 million

Toronto backlog of road repairs (in 2010): $300 million
Toronto budget for road repairs (2009-2013): $800 million
Toronto backlog of Gardiner repairs (in 2008): $87 million
Gardiner annual maintainance cost (in 2000): $12 million
Toronto 2010 Capital Budget toward road repairs: 55%

Beyond the work we already know we have to do, burying the Gardnier is farther down my own list of priorities then say a 1-2km tunnel to connect Lawrence Ave W and Lawrence Ave E.
 
Well you demonstrate yourself that just maintaining the Gardiner as is will cost a hundred million dollars or more. All the more reason to bring it down. I obviously don't think that we should remove the Gardiner at the expense of basic maintenance elsewhere. I certainly think that removing one of the many blights on our waterfront is more useful than a billion dollar project to spare a handful of drivers a few minute detour.
 
I would like to see it torn down The transportation network does not require the Gardiner, but of greater importance, the cost of maintaining it will only increase with time. However, if the main motivation toward removing the Gardiner is to improve the street scape, I say keep it and bury the train tracks instead. They are a far greater barrier to the water front and awful to walk under.

My preferred alternative to the Gardiner once it is removed is to replace it with two separate 1 way roads. This would prevent the emergence of a new 10 lane super road, and make it easier to sequence the traffic lights. The streets should be placed as far apart as possible to lessen their impact.
 
Anybody got figures on traffic on the Gardiner? I've always wondered if it's feasible to toll the highway and make enough to bury it. And what if it was just the tunnel that was tolled?
 
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Other cities want to get rid of their expressways. Here's an article on Paris' Georges Pompidou Expressway, here's the link:

In 2001, some Parisian drivers were furious because their new mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, not only converted street lanes to transit lanes but also closed the Georges Pompidou Expressway to drivers for a month during the summer, as a centerpiece of his efforts to fulfill his campaign pledge to reduce automobile use. Drivers complained that, within a few months of being elected, Delanoë had caused so much congestion that traffic on the city’s Boulevard St.-Germain backed up all the way to the Boulevard Périphérique.

In 2002, rather than retreating, Delanoë converted this freeway on the Seine River to Paris-Plage (Paris Beach) for a month during the summer. He brought in sand, palm trees, a climbing wall, and ball courts. Parisians sunbathed by the Seine during the day, and strolled and listened to concerts there in the evening.

Paris-Plage attracted 2,000,000 people during the summer of 2002. It was so popular that it has become a regular yearly event. It has also helped promote Delanoë's plans to reduce Paris's traffic dramatically and to close the Pompidou Expressway permanently.

Pompidou and his Expressway

Georges Pompidou was Premier of France from 1962 to 1968, under the Presidency of Charles De Gaulle. In 1969, less than a year after losing the Premiership, he was elected to succeed De Gaulle as President, and he remained President until his death in 1974 at age 62.

Pompidou was also a great lover of the automobile, and as Premier, he argued that a freeway should replace the grass-covered bank of the Seine by saying: "les Français aiment leurs bagnoles" (the French love their cars).

On March 27, 1966, Paris made the decision that existing roadways along the Seine should be connected to create a continuous expressway along the Seine through the center of Paris. The Voie Georges Pompidou (George Pompidou Expressway) was completed in 1967, and ran along the right bank of the Seine for 13 kilometers, connecting with the Boulevard Périphérique (Peripheral Boulevard) that circles central Paris at both ends.

Fortunately, there was only room on the riverbank for a two-lane expressway. Pompidou wanted to cover the Seine with concrete to create room for a wider expressway, but the environmental movement and freeway revolt stopped any further freeway expansion in Paris.

The New Regime of Bertrand Delanoë

Bertrand Delanoë was elected mayor of Paris in March, 2001, after running on a platform that promised to support public transportation, walking, and bicycling at the expense of the automobile. A conservative city government that supported more automobile use was suddenly replaced by a Socialist-Green government that promised to reduce automobile use. Delanoë is a Socialist and is also gay.

Delanoë had served in the city council and city senate of Paris since 1976, and he was president of the Socialist group in the city council from 1993 to 2001. Delanoë focused his mayoral campaign on the pollution caused by increasing automobile use in the city, promising to "fight, with all the means at my disposal, against the harmful, ever-increasing and unacceptable hegemony of the automobile.â€

In his inaugural address, Delanoë quoted the composer Erik Satie, who (Delanoë said) summed up the opinion of many Parisians when he said, “L’air de Paris est si mauvais que je le fais toujours bouillir avant de respirer.†– the air of Paris is so bad that I always boil it before breathing. Then he stated his two major initiatives to improve transit: reserved bus corridors on major streets, to speed up bus service, and a new tramway around the periphery of Paris.

During its first year, his government also developed a plan for sustainable development of Paris, saying that “limitation of the many nuisances associated with automobile traffic are at the heart of†the plan. Among other things, the plan called for:

* a new division of public space, more favorable to bus, pedestrians, bicyclist, and roller skaters.

* better public transit service.

* parking policies that reduce automobile use, by favoring residential parking over commuter parking.

* a complete set of bicycle routes through the city

* “quartiers verts†(green neighborhoods) in the center of Paris, with one-way streets that would make it impossible for through traffic to use local streets.

The two initial projects that came out of this plan had some success. A new tramway line was created, and 15 kilometers of car-free bus-bike-taxi lanes were built.

The city government fell behind its goal of creating 41 kilometers of car-free bus-bike-taxi lanes a year, because these lanes needed approval of the national police, who are not answerable to the mayor and who do listen to complaints of drivers. The lanes that were built were not not completely successful, because there were complaints that speeding taxis were a threat to bicyclists, but they did speed up bus service, reducing trip times by an estimated 10 to 20 percent – and they caused temporary traffic jams while traffic patterns were changing to adjust to the new street capacity.

From Pompidou Expressway to Paris-Plage

In the summer of 2002, as a symbolic centerpiece to this new transportation policy, the Delanoë government closed the Pompidou Expressway to cars from July 15 to August 15 between between 6am and 11pm – just a few months after after he was elected. This is a time when many Parisians are out of the city on vacation, but it is also a time when the city does most construction work on the streets, which causes traffic jams in itself.

For several years previously, the expressway was closed to traffic for a few hours during Sundays in late July and August. The longer-term closure came as a surprise to many motorists, because it was done without adequate notification to the public. About 70,000 cars a day normally use this expressway, and when they were suddenly displaced, there were traffic jams on parallel routes, such as boulevard Saint-Germain. Drivers complained that they were suffering for no reason, because the closed expressway was not heavily used by pedestrians.

In response to these criticisms, the Forum of Young Greens of d'Ile-de-France Green Party, joined by several Green city councilmembers, held a ceremony to “debaptize†the expressway, so it would no longer be named after Pompidou. A couple of days later gave it the new name “Voie de La Velorution.†(The word “velorution†is a play on the words “revolution†and “velo,†French for bicycle.) But Delanoë condemned this effort, and one of his aides commented, “One should not joke about the name and memory of a former president of the republic.â€

The first moves to reserve lanes for buses came shortly after the expressway closing. The Rue de Rivoli, which was congested when it was three lanes, became more congested temporarily when a lane was reserved for buses and only two were left for cars. This plan also provoked intense criticism. Yves Galland of the centrist UDF party said the plan was " actually increasing pollution in Paris by blocking the traffic." And Jean-Pierre Jerabek of the Ile-de-France Automobile Club said, "Car use is not a whim, it's essential for people's work, especially those who live in the suburbs. People want traffic to flow better in Paris, not worse. Mr Delanoë must rid himself of this idea that motorists will just abandon their cars."

Delanoë responded that he expected "a bit of initial fuss" when streets were closed. He added "I'm not obsessed by cars. I'm obsessed with the health of Parisians. Is it my fault that the automobile is the city's major source of pollution and that it takes up two-thirds of the road surface? Things have to be brought back into balance - that's what our policy is all about."

Despite the criticism, a poll found that 66% of Parisians approved the 2001 closure of the Pompidou expressway, both because it made the banks of the Seine more pleasant and because it limited air pollution. Approval was strongest among young people, women, and those who did not use or rarely used cars. Because 56% of Parisians do not own cars, Delanoë had a good reason to expect support for his policies.

The city government decided to do a better job of closing the expressway the following summer. It gave more advance notice to motorists, it closed the road a week later, when more Parisians were out of the city, and it planned to attract more people by converting the expressway’s right of way into “Paris Plage†– Paris beach.

To create Paris Plage, the city closed the road 24 hours a day. At a cost of 1.5 million euros, it brought palm trees in wooden planters, beach umbrellas, beach chairs, a climbing wall, outdoor cafes, refreshment stands, bicycle rentals, and enough sand to create small areas of sandy beaches in addition to the grassy beaches made up of the grassy shoulders of the road. It also planned entertainment, such as clowns, jugglers, and street artists during the day, and concerts with dancing during the evenings. But this would be a beach where no one would go in the water: swimming in the Seine is forbidden because of pollution.

Between July 21 and August 18, 3.8 kilometers (over two miles) of the expressway was closed to create this beach, from the Tuileries west of the Louvre to Quai Henri IV, beyond Ile St Louis. Paris-Plage was more popular than anyone had expected: it attracted 600,000 visitors on the first day alone, and it attracted 2 million visitors during the entire time that the freeway was closed and the beach was open. Le Monde commented that the operation “silenced critics from the municipal right, strengthened the good image of the mayor of Paris, and ... was a true popular success.â€
Permanent Closure of the Pompidou

Because of this success, the summer closure of the Pompidou Expressway to create Paris-Plage has become a regular yearly event, and the city government began talking about a complete closure of the expressway.

In 2007, Delanoë unveiled a dramatic plan to cut automobile use in Paris by 40% and to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60%. This new plan would create a network of “civilized thoroughfares†that give priority to buses and bicycles, would extend tramways, would create a new suburban commuter train line, and would pedestrianize the banks of the Seine entirely, removing the Ponpidou Expressway.

Despite opposition from right-wing parties, this detailed plan was adopted by the Paris town council. It cannot go into effect until after the local elections of 2008, which Delanoë is expected to win.

Though he was indignant when the young Greens tried to “debaptize†the Pompidou Expressway, Delanoë is moving to do much more than just change the expressway’s name. He is moving to eliminate it completely. Given Pompidou’s own pro-freeway bias, the final irony would be to remove the freeway and to create a pedestrian waterfront named Pompidou Park.

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I think that in the future when the Gardiner's actually not needed, it would make sense to turn the eastern edge into a High Line type of park, perhaps to be the big bike arterial throughout downtown. However, doing so wouldn't fix the problem that's associated with the Gardiner. The two big problems with the Downtown-Waterfront separation are really the Rail Line and Lakeshore.

Really honestly, I don't think I've seen anyone who really minds going underneath the Gardiner (unless it's raining but that's a smaller issue.) The big problem is Lakeshore, which is a gigantic, hugely pedestrian unfriendly road that makes it seem like a huge barrier along with a 2 minute walk under the rail line. All you need to do is add some sidewalks and make it like a regular street instead of trying to turn Lakeshore into a highway, which is what it is like right now. University-ify it, basically.
For the rail line, just add some lights and clean up the underside of the rail overpasses. It's dark, dirty and grungy, and very unpleasant for such a long walk. If you built buildings and street life around the Lakeshore, the tunnels under the rail lines could actually be legitimate connectors between different neighborhoods. Right now, there's nothing to go to on the other side, at least nothing to justify going under the rail lines. The only exception is Union Station, which is an example of how all the underpasses should work.
 
I think the emphasis for years has been on the wrong section of the Gardiner - the biggest benefit to the city would be to bury it between the Humber and Dufferin, where it cuts through the western waterfront and south Parkdale. It is there that it's a true barrier since it runs at grade or slightly below. The elevated portion is not a barrier, although in the long run it should be taken down as well, once adequate mass transit has been out in place, such as the DRL and electrified GO Lakeshore.

And on a related note, I'd be in favour of burying the railways through the core as well.
 
I think the emphasis for years has been on the wrong section of the Gardiner - the biggest benefit to the city would be to bury it between the Humber and Dufferin, where it cuts through the western waterfront and south Parkdale. It is there that it's a true barrier since it runs at grade or slightly below. The elevated portion is not a barrier, although in the long run it should be taken down as well, once adequate mass transit has been out in place, such as the DRL and electrified GO Lakeshore.

And on a related note, I'd be in favour of burying the railways through the core as well.

And I thought I was crazy for being the only one that thinks this. Access to the waterfront along the western portions of the Gardiner is far worse than through the core. For all the talk about it being "a barrier" at least you can cross under the Gardiner downtown.
 
And I thought I was crazy for being the only one that thinks this. Access to the waterfront along the western portions of the Gardiner is far worse than through the core. For all the talk about it being "a barrier" at least you can cross under the Gardiner downtown.
Quite true. Can you imagine how much more pleasant that park would be without being along the edge of an expressway.
 
I seriously don't understand why there hasn't been some serious study on what it would take to bury it and the economical feasability of such an option if it was tolled.

I say bury the thing and build Miller's grand Lakeshore Blvd on top of the thing. Think of that grand blvd as the collector's lanes for the expressway running underneath. And if it's feasible toss in the rail lines too. Then toll the whole thing.

I really think it's feasible. Private industry won't do it, because the pay-off would be 20+ years. But if the city were to take the lead, it's most certainly feasible. They could even sub-contract toll collection to the 407 ETR folks so that people don't have to buy a new transponder.
 

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