October 5th, 2006
JOHN LORINC COLUMN: An immodest proposal for the Gardiner
Posted by John Lorinc
An immodest proposal for the Gardiner
The depressing thing about this election is that the voters are being told they’re not allowed to talk about city building. Setting aside Jane Pitfield’s hell-in-a-handcart rhetoric and the methane emanating from the $300,000-man Stephen LeDrew, David Miller has said we can’t debate highway tolls, congestion charges and the future of the Gardiner. Everyone’s forgotten about Union Station. Miller’s taking credit for a waterfront planning process that chugs along on its own steam. As for the island airport, the mayor will produce sound-bite outrage, but we all know that debate’s done and gone.
Rather than accepting a controversy-free election, I’d like to challenge the candidates to sink their teeth into one of the Gardiner proposals that gets no love from the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation nor ink from the media, yet represents a genuinely gutsy and immodest proposal with the potential to transform all those new lakefront development tracts into truly urban communities.
The so-called “Transformation” option, at its most basic, involves shifting Lakeshore Boulevard out from beneath the Gardiner and then eliminating several of the space-hogging on/off ramps. The insight at the heart of this plan, developed in 2002 by architects John van Nostrand and Calvin Brooks, is that barrier effect along the waterfront is due to the fact that the two roads are stacked, and thus form a kind of vehicular Berlin Wall. Under the plan — which, at an estimated $415 million, is the cheapest of the three Gardiner options — Lakeshore is turned into a normal six-lane road with no ceiling. But the cool part of this plan is that it frees up acres of publicly-owned space beneath the Gardiner, which can be put to new and interesting uses. This is infill at its grittiest.
Skeptical? Miller is, as are the waterfront planners. But they’d do well to check out what’s happened beneath the Westway, an elevated expressway that presses through the heart of north-west London. Since the 1980s, a not-for-profit trust has methodically reclaimed 23 acres of land under that expressway, establishing an amazing array of local amenities [photos above], including a skate park [photo below], a soccer pitch [photo top], a child care, complexes for offices and shops [photo below], as well as a range of other structures, such as artists studios and light industrial buildings. The trust is run by a coalition of north-end London organizations, and thus responds to the needs of a dense, diverse community. This is a terrific example of how city building initiatives can percolate up, rather than being imposed from on high by land-use planning exercises driven by developers, architects and engineers.
But let’s not forget about the money. Miller and Pitfield insist there’s no money for the Gardiner tear-down. Maybe they should consider this detail: the Westway Trust has generated some 300 million pounds of development over the years, a windfall that strongly suggests the City of Toronto could make the Transformation option pay for itself. No tolls. No casinos. No parking surtax. Rather, it’s about letting the city grow organically into all the nooks and crannies developers scoff at, but frequently turn out to be the most compelling urban spaces.
The TWRC’s humongous Gardiner study, released last week, said the Transformation option requires “significant” repair work on the Gardiner decks to make sure they don’t collapse on the buildings or parks proposed for their nether regions. But the TWRC’s cost estimates didn’t include the $12 million a year the city currently shells out for ongoing structural maintenance on the Gardiner, nor the projected revenues from re-developing all that freed-up land.
Toronto used to be really good at this sort of thing — reclaiming orphaned spaces and eschewing the big-buck mega-project for a more nuanced reading of how cities work. In other words, the Transformation option is perfectly calibrated to Toronto’s fiscally cautious but urban-minded political temperament. It won’t clog the roads or break the bank. Yet it will allow the East Bayfront to evolve into a real neighbourhood, with all the little odd-ball amenities diverse urban neighbourhoods need, but developers tend not to build.
As I’ve written previously, the TWRC’s preferred option — tearing down the Gardiner from Spadina to the Don River and replacing it with a grand street — deserves serious consideration. But the Transformation option is a realistic alternative, one that offers up an urban-minded, pedestrian-scale solution at an affordable price. And it seems to me that an election is the ideal time to begin having a discussion about the relative merits of each.
October 5, 2006 - 10:42 am
Permalink for JOHN LORINC COLUMN: An immodest proposal for the Gardiner
John Lorinc
Categories
Toronto-2006, John Lorinc column, Traffic, Development, Waterfront
Loading ...
Comments
The trouble with a compromise like this is that it keeps the darn road. Maybe forever. It needs to be placed underground — with a park on top.
Comment by Mike Jones
October 5, 2006 @ 4:47 pm
I don’t get it.
It’s not like you’re suggesting we eliminate Lakeshore altogether, you’re suggesting we move it. So we free up the land under the Gardiner, so that we can turn land not under the Gardiner into a 6-lane roadway. This makes no sense whatsoever.
If we have the space available to move Lakeshore, then I would suggest using that space for the great uses you mentioned above rather than using the space for yet another road.
I mean, which is a better use of space: putting soccer pitches, skate parks and childcare facilities in the open air (where trees, grass and the like can grow), or putting a 6-lane roadway in the open air? I don’t know about you, but I think it’s more important for kids to play in spaces where there isn’t as much traffic noise and trees and plants can grow than for cars to drive in them.
Besides, the Gardiner already has loads of orphaned spaces under and around it that could be used for the uses you mentioned. We can make better use of the space and generate revenue without ever touching Lakeshore.
Comment by Melissa Goldstein
October 5, 2006 @ 5:10 pm
I’d love to know how you propose to eliminate the noise and emissions from such a structure. And with fewer ramps, wouldn’t more cars be dumped into those areas? Where were you thinking, Spadina perhaps?
I grew up with an expressway outside my window in downtown montreal, and it is an awful thing.
I suggested this as a response to an earlier column on the Gardiner report: turn the expressway itself into the park. Contain the area under it and use it for combined transit and traffic. Put a people-mover type lrt or monorail on top to facilitiate movement between High Park, downtown, Harbourfront and eventually the Beaches. Let commerce in, have one half of the expressway area ‘pure’ park, and the other allow cafes and small boutiques: maybe an open air market. In short, all the things that you suggest would be under a horrible, dank noisy structure would be on top of it, allowing the noxious aspects to be contained…
Full write up here: http://omnivore.ca/article/70/gardiner-garden
Comment by dan
October 5, 2006 @ 5:33 pm
A couple of points in response to the previous comments:
According to the Transformation option, the re-located Lakeshore Blvd will create smaller and more urban-scale blocks south of the Gardiner, which has the desirable side-effect of making giant condo developments a bit harder to pull off.
As for the traffic on the Gardiner — I agree with Dan’s concerns about noise and pollution. These may, over the long term, be mitigated by the fact that the city won’t do anything to the Gardiner without expanding the Richmond/Adeliade ramps, and then building the Front Street Extension. These changes, plus the removal of some ramps, makes the Gardiner much less attractive from a commuting point of view, and so there will likely be a long-term decline in traffic. (The city says the Gardiner volumes through the core have held steady for almost three decades.)
That dynamic, in turn, paves the way for an eventual change in the use of the deck — someday, perhaps, it becomes a rapid transit route or an elevated park or something else entirely.
Lastly, the thinking around the Transformation option is that it is ultimately preferable to creating a very wide, and difficult to traverse, arterial on the ground, which is the primary critique of the other Gardiner fixes.
Comment by John Lorinc
October 5, 2006 @ 7:23 pm
You know what. Let’s leave the bloody Gardiner alone until the oil is gone. Then we’ll see, in less than two decades, if we need any expressways at all for f***ing cars. Two decades too long? With the way the west is using oil, India and China are coming on-stream, and American botch-up foreign policy in the Middle East, filling up a car is going to look financially unattractive much sooner.
Electric and Hydrogen cars as viable mass transit? Ha ha ha. The former, perhaps, but how many more nuclear reactors do you think the public would accept (and apparently, there is a peak-nuke as well as peak-oil).
Leave it alone until it falls down. Jane Jacobs was right about a lot of things, not least of which was her book “Dark Age Ahead.” Read up. Now she’s wrong if we can reorientate human societies into less sociopathic-capitalist-individualist forms, but history both recent and ancient show more examples of stasis than reinvention.
Comment by aidan
October 5, 2006 @ 8:53 pm
All well and good, but what do you do with the railway corridor just north of Lakeshore which is still a barrier to the waterfront?
The car is not going away anytime soon. The auto industry is too critical and vital to world economy and I am sure alternate fuel sources will be developed in time. The need for efficient expressways to move traffic will still be there.
As to replacing the Gardiner with a ‘grand street’ how will this effectivley move traffic? Take a look at University Avenue between Bloor and Front during rush hour if you want an idea.
Also you would have to either install traffic lights at almost every intersection for pedestrians, thus creating further gridlock. Or you could build unsightly pedestrian bridges over the roadway, or you could build pedestrian tunnels under the roadway which would be a haven for panhandlers, the homeless, and muggers.
Comment by Gary Powell
October 17, 2006 @ 7:56 am