The phrase for Toronto should be “fourth time, lucky.”
Thanks to some form of cosmic serendipity, we are indeed lucky to have bagged the 2015 Pan Am Games, as opposed to the 1996 and/or 2008 Summer Olympics, plus an Expo that would have been a boondoggle of epic proportions.
By comparison to the phantasmorgic spectacle of the Olympics, the Pan-Am event is appealingly modest, with a minimal risk of screw-up. Yet there’s a potentially enormous payoff for waterfront revitalization, provided the City plays its cards right.
The 2,100-unit athlete’s village, in the West Donlands, represents the development anchor the waterfront so desperately needed, and not just for that region beyond the hoardings east of the Distillery District.
By happy circumstance, the village units will come onto the market when Toronto’s economy should again be on full boil, and I’m hoping the City’s planning staff recognizes the need to do everything they can to direct non-Pan Am investment capital to the area as a means of creating a critical mass of development activity there.
If the City and Waterfront Toronto can get their acts together, the athlete’s village should also become the carrot that lures mixed-used development to the area south of Queen’s Quay — already the site of the Corus headquarters, a new campus for George Brown College and a recently launched park at the foot of Sherbourne.
Waterfront Toronto will need to put the pause button on its other ventures, devoting all its resources to streamlining East Bayfront water’s edge improvements, the construction of local LRT lines and great pedestrian linkages up to the West Donlands.
Which begs the age-old question: whither the Gardiner?
It’s an especially timely issue, given David Miller’s new career plans. He’s long said he wants to knock down the portion east of Yonge and replace it with a broad, at-grade boulevard. Council approved the terms of reference for an environmental assessment in the summer, and the document is now with provincial officials.
The city’s procedural timeline indicates a decision in 2011, which means there’s going to be a huge temptation for Miller to press the province to fast track the plan with an eye to winning council approval for a capital-L legacy project before he leaves office.
I think it would be the wrong thing to do.
Miller should allow the Gardiner take-down scheme — a problematic venture in many ways — to die on the vine, and focus instead on getting the rest of the Pan-Am preparations right in his remaining year. That means pushing hard to get the Union Station renovation well underway while nailing down the development east of Yonge.
Rather than delve into a possibly futile council battle over the Gardiner, Miller should use the opportunity afforded by the Games — plus the remaining pennies in his political piggy bank — to fight for funding for the Scarborough-Malvern LRT, which is meant to extend out to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus (UTSC).
And it will be a fight, as became evident Friday when just-announced mayoral candidate George Smitherman threw water on Miller’s suggestion that the project be accelerated, given UTSC’s role as a major swim venue for the event.
Downtown, the new “Water Table” art installation on the underside of the Gardiner offers further proof that the expressway, as an urban object, can be transformed, as architects John van Nostrand and Calvin Brook have” argued since 2003.
Better that a much-needed rapid transit line to a remote corner of the city be David Miller’s parting shot.
photo by Wylie Poon
18 comments
The Gardiner is a very useful piece of infrastructure for many people which needs to be maintained even if we successful increase transit ridership. We need to go the Swiss route and tunnel that expressway. Even if it becomes a toll route to cover costs, I think people would prefer it to a monster boulevard. I’m tired of the “there’s no money” argument because as Canada’s largest city by far, we have a lot of leverage.
I think A.R. has mentioned the key thing: “monster blvd” — people don’t picture that when they think of the Gardiner being removed, they think of College and Clinton, which will not happen. It will be Dundas and University instead.
Honestly, I prefer an open-air “monster blvd” to a decked “monster blvd” that it current is. It’s still gonna be a traffic snafu, so I’d prefer to see sun on it. That way we could still build a series of pedestrian-cycling bridges over top of it.
That said, if they could bury it, I’d be all over that. But I don’t see it happening since the investment is not worth the return (maybe if we started doing it in the 1990s).
If they do decide to keep it up, they have to make it work better for those using it and living around it. Build into it, put a hanging-LRT on the underside of the deck to increase transit without disturbing too much road traffic. Put skate parks under it. Allow ivy to grow up the columns.
Why is it too late to bury it? Isolating it would improve urban livability by reducing a lot of noise which projects and neutralize its “dangerous barrier” perception through investment and allow for open and more pleasant public spaces and hence draw more people to the area. It’s what so many Torontonians have called for over the past decades; it’s the solution many feel is right except some technocrats.
It has to be rebuilt anyway; burying it will become a real possibility. It may take a lot of money, but I think that cities which can and do make those kinds of investments emerge as admirable and superior. We could continue to build a city where subway lines are only for replacing overpacked streetcar lines, where burying the electrical grid and replacing the ugly wooden poles is deemed as not worth the investment, but it just leaves citizens obsessed with other cities and always feeling a justified sense of inferiority.
Did Miller actually insinuate that he intended to fast-track the Gardiner removal (i.e. decision before his term ends)? The author appears to have created this scenario in order to use it as a launch pad for his own preferences, however valid they may be (I should point out that I happen to agree with the author’s preferences).
Secondly, if the at-grade boulevard does look like University Avenue, that will serve the City much better than the current Gardiner/Lakeshore combo. Yes, it will still be a wide road that is cumbersome for pedestrians to cross, but at the same time the benefits will hopefully be (a) creation of a genuinely pedestrian street (the way University Av is and Lakeshore is not), (b) slowing down of traffic, (c) reduction of car traffic coming into downtown. At the same time, there will be other impacts city-wide, such as congestion further downstream on the Gardiner/Lakeshore, or people having to relocate their residence to adjust. These are the kinds of things that we should be debating. Do we want a more pedestrian-oriented city, or one that is geared toward accommodating the car at every turn?
A monster blvd like college/university is certainly not the “pedestrian-friendly” vision that most of the “let’s tear down the gardiner” crowd have been promising as an inducement to do what they advocate. The probability is that the resulting monster boulevard will be even more daunting than college/university since the speed limit is likely to be much higher.
Quite a while back somebody on on Spacing mentioned that “world-class” cities were “burying” their inner city expressways, the implication being that they were getting rid of these. Look at what’s actually taking place though and you see that some cities are getting rid of these expressways — but other cities are placing them underground. Yeah, all these cities are “burying” their expressways… but they certainly aren’t doing the same thing.
Boston, to cite the most egregious example, spent $14 Billion to bury its waterfront expressway, and given that we’ll have a world class fight to secure the $500 million just to knock it down, I simply can’t imagine where the money will come from, or why it would be preferable to use all that capital for a road tunnel as opposed to a lot of subway tunnels…
The major problem with the proposed boulevard — as I wrote in the magazine last year — is that there won’t be much of anything on its north side, which abuts the rail embankment for much of its length. In other words, we’ll have a very wide, one-sided, north-facing street with lots of traffic and therefore not much pedestrian activity or street life.
For much of the distance of the Gardiner we already have that artery in the form of Lake Shore Boulevard snaking underneath. Even if we do have a massive street down there (I for one never imagined it being like College – talk about a straw man!) just getting rid of the various onramps and offramps and area where pedestrians and cyclists have trouble crossing would be beneficial, in my opinion.
How beneficial is an open question. Though I believe we will eventually get rid of the Gardiner, and I am strongly opposed to “burying” it, at this time I think the money can be better spent elsewhere, or not at all, perhaps.
I only say College and Clinton to refer to “cozy urban street” — I fear if the Gardiner is removed it’ll be a great civic let down with what actually replaces it.
I have heard all the arguments from both sides…for the tear down / against the tear down…no matter the end result there will be pros and cons…I am for the tear down and counter all the people saying its important to leave up with this one case study…the embarcadero in san fran…have a watch of this wonderful video…i was there a month ago…and it is much better than now then when the highway ran above…
watch it and tell me what you think!
http://www.streetfilms.org/category/traffic-calming/
itll be the last video on the third page of vid clips..
enjoy
I say leave the Gardiner as is for the most part – perhaps remove a few ramps to make the underside more navigable and restrict its use to longer-distance drivers – and spend the money on transit. It may be pie in the sky, but if we slowly increase transit capacity as we decrease the appeal of driving (tolls, congestion charges) then the Gardiner can later come down altogether without being seriously missed.
There is assumption that we must fit all existing Gardiner traffic into the existing grid – instead I think we should think about progressively choking the Gardiner with a HOV lane and speed limit restrictions from 90 to 60 in the core and see where the traffic goes.
John’s point is well made though – there’s no point in simply assuming the expressway’s departure will be a panacea when in places the rail corridor is just as big of a block – its diagonal cut through the Don Lands makes for a highly dysfunctional grid which forces local traffic onto the already congested eastern approaches. The Waterfront Toronto precinct plan makes no allowance for a local road for all the new residents in West Don Lands, so those heading east will be adding to the traffic on Eastern and on Lakeshore which would be crowded by refugees from the Gardiner already.
Throttle the Gardiner/turn it into a transitway, provide the DRL for 416ers for the cost of burying the Gardiner, tax incoming 905ers. Sounds like a winner to me.
If, heaven forbid, an earthquake hits Toronto and busts up the Gardiner, we should definitely follow San Francisco’s lead. Barring that, the choice in my view comes down to a decision between a highly conventional, engineered option — the boulevard — and a highly unconventional, multi-faceted option — finding ways to incorporate this massive object into the life of the city. I prefer the latter because it’s like open source programming. There are many possibilities, and the challenge provokes the sort of imagination that begat the Water Table. For me, this is the kind of thing Toronto’s good at. It’s the ultimate adaptive re-use challenge.
Imagine if, in New York, the city had opted to knock down that elevated rail stub that’s now become a ground-breaking linear park. Demolition is the obvious course of action. We should take the road less travelled.
We could use it as a parking lot for 905ers.
Oh wait.
JOhn I hear on the use/reuse of gardiner…but.lets please not compare the beautiful iron structure that is the high line to the deteriorating hulk of concrete in toronto.. i have heard the ideas about its reuse…great..but what is it 15 mil a year in maintenance just to keep it from crumbling….i’d be all for adaptive use…but i’m havn a hard time believing that would occur…so much space goes to waste right now…other than parking there is no other land user underneath…
i say tear the east section down and we’ll see the result…little change in traffic, more land for redevelopment, more parks etc etc etc…a very little negative impact….
John:
“…have argued since 2003.â€Â
Just to put it in perspective, some of us have been arguing to use the Gardiner more cleverly since the mid-Eighties: http://bit.ly/1o72Wi.
Toronto just isn’t ready to see the potential of heroic pieces of infrastructure like the Gardiner. They’re terrible at lots of levels, sure, but we shouldn’t be afraid to remember what we built, look at them without blinkers, and use the good bits to build new marvels.
I’m in agreement w/Ryan that the comparison to the High line is completely inapt.
The highline is not merely much narrower, it is also much closer to the ground (not that high after all).
The notion that the Gardiner might one day be used for something other than its intended purpose veers towards the preposterous, as it would be the equivalent of climbing 4 storeys of stairs at least to get up there, and of course that would not provide barrier free access!
Never mind access for emergency personnel and on and on.
The only choice is between keeping it, roughly as is; perhaps with a more imaginative paint job, prettier lighting, and better landscaping at the ground level; or tearing it down.
Whereas the the former involves millions in on-going maintenance costs for minimum utility (in the east of Yonge area traffic volumes are remarkably low), and the ability to mitigate effectively is questionable at best; I therefore much prefer the latter, which is to say, knocking it down.
As said by others, this is not a panacea, and a new Lakeshore of 6 lanes (8 really isn’t needed) would not be cozy; but would be much more aesthetically pleasing, allow for nice trees/streetscapes and if not an idea, then at least a passable pedestrian experience, as opposed to a non-existent/dreadful one.
Finally, on cost, tolls, tolls, tolls and tolls. This is not complicated, it is do-able, and it will generate the required funds several times over, even at modest rates.
Were the tolls on each of the Gardiner and DVP tomorrow set identically to those on 407, the City could expect to net several hundred million per year.
Yes, alternate transit has to be in place, but that’s another post.
I’m in favour of burying it as I said. I’ve seen small towns in Switzerland like St. Gallen with buried expressways under entire neighbourhoods. It seems like if small towns in Switzerland can build infrastructure like that, why not Canada’s most prominent city? That gap should be narrowed. Comparing it to the Big Dig isn’t fair; the big dig involved more complex challenges like intersecting an old and vital transit tunnel under water. A mistake could have flooded the tunnel and killed tens of thousands. The Big Dig also packaged transit improvements.
James said:
“The notion that the Gardiner might one day be used for something other than its intended purpose veers towards the preposterous, as it would be the equivalent of climbing 4 storeys of stairs at least to get up there, and of course that would not provide barrier free access!
Never mind access for emergency personnel and on and on.”
If this was done, I don’t see why you didn’t consider using the existing ramps for cars. They would make it easy for people, cyclists and EMS vehicles to use it.