UrbanOptic said:
The proposal to bring the Gardner Expressway to grade level from Spadina Avenue through downtown has met a stalemate of sorts and the $800+ million budget would undeniably fall short of the potential cost of creating a boulevard style thoroughfare that would be successful to accommodate the volume.
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Correct---Now we are making sense.. In short then, the Gardiner is not "coming down". It isn't going anywhere, and will surely remain a part of the urban fabric of Toronto for years, probably decades, to come.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
And rightly so. Love driving into the city on the Gardiner!
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I echo your sentiment and add that removing the Gardiner would simply force more office development to the suburbs.

Having said that, I would also have to add that the addition of thousands of downtown condos has significantly increased the attractiveness of building office space downtown.

The company I used to work for was contemplating acquiring new office digs and one of the prime considerations was how accessible the building was to employees. We ended up moving to the 905 for that reason. The current subway system is nothing but a continuous link of sardine cans in rush hour (For those of us who experience it daily you know it’s not an attractive feature) and if there isn’t good vehicle access a lot of people will choose to work elsewhere. I believe the condo boom will ultimately be a key driver in a potential office boom.
 
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The one tower is now at eye-level with the Gardiner. The shape of the floorplate is quite striking and already noticeably not-a-box. Driving by I was also very surprised at how slender it was. From the elevations and the renderings I was under the impression the towers would be much thicker than they are.

Infinity is still below the Gardiner, but is high enough now that you can see the floor slab while you're driving by. It's big, if nothing else, and should make the appearance of Ice all the more dramatic when driving in from the west.
 
this one will definitely be an eye popper on the gardiner, especially considering how close it is to it... and even more so will be 10 york (not in terms of design but impact)... i'd take the ICE design over 10 york ANY DAY!.. i don't understand all the hype for it (the height is fine, but the design kinda sucks imo)
 
Burying the Gardiner is an option that should be explored... (I doubt the people that make the big decisions... will just remove it... unless something is invented that makes it obsolete.) Dream big.. by burying it... like Boston and their great big dig project. And... once that's completed they could consider burying the CN/Via/Go train line... as well. Just think of the land uses. Parks... more condos, more office towers... awe... uTOpia... communities divided by these important transportation links would be reconnected. As residents of Toronto... we owe it to ourselves to press for this to be done now... to make the city more liveable.

With all the development that could occur on these pathways... the city could probably fund this project with the development fees... and it's an option worth exploring.
 
Agreed. I've been living in Boston for the last 4 or so months, and I have to say: the big dig has had a huge impact on the city. It's opened it up so beautifully. If we could bury the Gardner from Leslie to, say....Jameson-ish, it'd be such a huge improvement.
 
The swath of the Gardiner from the Lakeshore on-ramp at the Don to Jameson is pretty much all of the Gardiner... but I agree it would indeed be a huge boon for land rights. Putting the whole thing underground would open up all sorts of opportunities in an area that's prime for real estate.

The thing about keeping the Gardiner up is the obscene costs of, well, keeping it up. The speed with which the concrete ages and becomes brittle, thanks to all those winters and the brutal exposure the undercarriage gets, guarantees that the system as it is will continue to cost the city huge amounts of money simply to keep it from falling down. It is already a very heavily traveled roadway and in relatively short order it will either need to be widened (not likely now, given all the new developments practically sitting right at its edges now) or scrapped altogether in favour of something else. My bet is that in twenty years time or less the Gardiner will be gone. I'm hoping it's gone in much less than that but given the current administration (and the general lack of will on all levels of government to get the GTA's transportation priorities straight) I rather doubt it.
 
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Ahh right, by 'Leslie' I meant 'Carlaw,' and by 'Carlaw' I meant 'the on-ramp to the west.' :D

But yeah, bury it all, I say. A nice bike path and green area would be amazing, much like in Boston.
 
Miscreant said:
Ahh right, by 'Leslie' I meant 'Carlaw,' and by 'Carlaw' I meant 'the on-ramp to the west.' :D

But yeah, bury it all, I say. A nice bike path and green area would be amazing, much like in Boston.
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There was talk years ago about tunelling it under the lake at the waters edge from Bathurst to Cherry st.....now-a-days it sounds like a no brainer and less chaotic.
 
I had hoped one day the Gardiner would get buried, but reality of it coming true is getting dimmer and dimmer. They've already proposed it before over a decade ago and the idea got shot down. They talked about it a few years ago and it went nowhere while all the buildings starting going up beside the Gardiner. With the costs increasing exponentially, it seems highly unlikely. If they really wanted to get it done, they would have done it over a decade ago when it was proposed to beautify downtown. The costs then compared to now seem like peanuts. If it was too costly then, it's way more costly now and even more costly in the future. The option to put it by the lake shore is a good idea. Instead of digging, put landfill over it. But the govt has already stated they aren't going to infill anymore. If they did do it, it would negate all the plans they've made (future bridges) and the decks they built.
 
Based on the cost of Bonston's Big Dig, I don't believe we will ever see the Gardiner come down in Toronto. From Wikipedia re: the Big Dig:
The project was scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion (in 1982 dollars, US$6.0 billion adjusted for inflation as of 2006). The project was not completed, however, until December of 2007, at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars) as of 2006. The Boston Globe estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it will not be paid off until 2038.
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Major engineering works like this tend to escalate in cost.

Meanwhile, Toronto has about $300,000,000 in deferred road maintenance to deal with some day, and billions of dollars worth in transit projects to build.

Why should the Gardiner, which costs about $20 million a year to keep operating, have hundreds of millions if not billions spent on it to essentially make the area prettier? We have way higher priorities for spending scarce transportation tax dollars. In a time when we can't even pour enough money into the TTC to run it properly, let alone build all of the new infrastructure it needs, I don't understand the rationale for spending any more than necessary on the Gardiner.

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The Gardiner actually won't be so bad once all the towers go up around it.. It will be less visible on the skyline and the view driving down it will be ONE OF A KIND! (think how many more car commercials we'll get)... The 2nd best option to me is going underground. Like a superhighway like they have in Boston or even that crazy highway from iRobot.... If not, then even like a Lower Wacker type of ghetto tunnel thing (heck! It looked cool in Batman!!!).

But yeah, budget is a HUGE factor. the money isn't there for this type of massive scale project.
 
interchange42 said:
Based on the cost of Bonston's Big Dig, I don't believe we will ever see the Gardiner come down in Toronto. From Wikipedia re: the Big Dig:

Major engineering works like this tend to escalate in cost.

Meanwhile, Toronto has about $300,000,000 in deferred road maintenance to deal with some day, and billions of dollars worth in transit projects to build.

Why should the Gardiner, which costs about $20 million a year to keep operating, have hundreds of millions if not billions spent on it to essentially make the area prettier? We have way higher priorities for spending scarce transportation tax dollars. In a time when we can't even pour enough money into the TTC to run it properly, let alone build all of the new infrastructure it needs, I don't understand the rationale for spending any more than necessary on the Gardiner.

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It wouldn't be merely to make the area prettier - thought that may be a side benefit, depending on how skillfully the whole project is finally realized; rather, what's being suggested is that the land the Gardiner occupies and sits over is escalating in value almost exponentially.... use that as economic leverage tied in with development to bury the Gardiner. It's already being swamped with condo towers in the centre core... I believe developers would love to be able to build a solid line of towers following the line of the Gardiner as it snakes along.

Raising the money is still a massive task, no doubt. However, I fully expect that the GTA's highway system is going to be hit by tolls - it's probably only a matter of time. An extension of the user-pay concept and a direct means of funding major new transportation infrastructure capital costs as well as ongoing maintenance programs. It's a dirty concept in North America but I think it's going to happen, if for no other reason that governments will no longer bankroll such massive capital projects without a strong stream of dedicated money to tap into directly - that would be the user base, your average driver of a vehicle, any vehicle, tooling along on a multilane highway running through the GTA.

But you may be right - it may never happen. Should that be the case, the city will suffer for it. And the Gardiner will not stay up indefinitely... there's only so many times it can be patched from beneath and resurfaced up top. But I agree with AKS - the ideal time to have done it is back a few decades - planning ahead for what is by now a city practically bursting beyond its current transportation capabilities. And we ought not to have stopped building subways, for that matter.

Anyway, the Gardiner remains a fantastic introduction to Toronto... it's only getting more dramatic as the years go by.
 
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