Council gets real on the Gardiner
Pipe dreams die hard. But one of Toronto’s biggest took a beating at city council on Friday when councillors voted 30-4 against a motion to ask staff to study tunnelling the Gardiner Expressway. (Yes, again.)
Coun. Anthony Perruzza led the tunnellers’ last stand, complaining the city had never really studied the idea properly. Eyes rolled.
“In the 1950s, plans for tunnelling the Gardiner in the vicinity of Parkdale and Exhibition Place were examined,” the staff report to council observes. “The idea re-emerged in the late 1980s, with enough public interest to inspire serious tunnelling proposals in 1987, 1991, 1999 and 2000.”
All foundered on the basic principle Coun. Norm Kelly enunciated Friday: “It is unworkable. It is unfundable. Let’s not waste any further time on it.”
Thinks are looking up for our friendless freeway. On Monday, Mayor John Tory announced the city would shell out $3.4 million extra to speed up construction and end road closures next summer, three months early.
Commuters will then enjoy a few months of relative bliss, before the real work begins in 2018: a “strategic rehabilitation” that will see one lane closed in each direction, in yet-to-be-determined chunks, as the expressway is in effect rebuilt from scratch.
Delays, as you can imagine, will be significant — perhaps as much as 20 minutes in each direction. And they will last six years.
That’s good news, if you can believe it. Under a previous plan, it was supposed to take 12 years. And there was another plan, no word of a lie, that would have taken 20. It boggles the mind anyone would even put his name to such an idea, or that any city council would have agreed to it.
Still, speed costs money. And Toronto city council hasn’t much liked spending vast sums of it on infrastructure. The sixyear, $2.6-billion plan to rebuild that Gardiner, approved by council Thursday, comes at a $300-million premium — with savings (in theory) derived from an innovative construction technique whereby prefabricated chunks of highway are dropped in sequentially like Lego blocks; and from a public-private-partnership arrangement under which up to one-third of the cost will be covered by federal programs.
Council voted to grant a “design-build-finance-operatemaintain” contract, the idea being that if the winning bidder is on the hook both for cost overruns and maintenance once the highway is built, it will have an incentive to build it properly.
This is a novel, mostly untested approach. We’ ll see how it pans out. But spending a bit more to get things done faster is an encouraging signal. Placing more value on our time, viewing congestion as something other than a fact of life, refusing to accept needless, lazy obstacles to getting around this city — illegally parked cars and delivery trucks, lane closures for non-existent construction — is something Tory has, to his credit, been pushing since his campaign for mayor.
“In the end, the most important thing is that people don’t have time taken out of their lives, and that it doesn’t cost the billions it could cost the economy to have this (Gardiner) thing go on for 20 years,” the mayor told reporters Thursday.
As the Gardiner began to shed its chunks of concrete over the years, the question of what to do with it in the long term has literally reduced various city councillors to tears. But at long last, we seem to be getting real. Razing the entire elevated portion is a perfectly viable option in principle, but not on the floor of council. Not even Olivia Chow ran on that. Toronto’s waterfront has prospered mightily despite the Gardiner, and it will continue to prosper once it’s out of rehab.
Council tore itself to bits choosing a “hybrid” option for the eastern elevated portion that’s not ideal for development purposes. But it will soon consider three superior options, developed in part with Tory’s encouragement.
It’s not perfect. We all wish it weren’t there, but the political reality is that we’re stuck with it. And the practical reality is that it’s not the end of the world.
We haven’t heard the last of the tunnellers — count on it. But out here in the sunlight, we are lurching toward a longterm solution everyone should be able to live with.