Corcoran on the glory of the Gardiner,
Why the east Gardiner should live
The Don Valley Parkway is one of the most beautiful urban expressways in the world, a meandering six-lane green wonder that moves south from the 401 through 15 kilometres of trees and valleys that change spectacularly with the season, the DVP’s smooth curves taking drivers to a great city whose skyline is glimpsed in brief moments until, on the final turn onto the connecting Gardiner Expressway, the full Toronto skyline appears, a turn best made at night when the lights of the CN Tower beckon, surrounded by glimmering condos and office buildings.
Then comes the best part. The final run along the Gardiner takes aim directly at the city’s centre, a space-movie drive through the heart of downtown, offices and dwellings moving past on both sides.
It’s as if one were travelling through the city like Han Solo in Star Wars, floating above the ground. At certain times, when traffic is thinner, it’s possible to glide right through the core of Toronto and emerge on the other side, heading west along the shore of Lake Ontario, the city drifting away in the rear view mirror.
It’s a grand continuum of urban automobile transport few cities can match, but a continuum that could be destroyed at a Toronto city council vote next week. One of two options before council is to tear down and remove a 1.7-kilometre section of the Gardiner. Instead of riding clear over the Gardiner into downtown, the removed section between the Don Valley and Jarvis Street would drop commuters down to ground level, where they will be immediately embedded in an eight-lane surface roadway interrupted by four sets of traffic signals, pedestrian crosstraffic and greater congestion.
Proponents of removal talk about replacing the Gardiner with a grand Parisian boulevard, a sparkling “tree-lined” corridor filled with walkers, joggers, cyclists and stylish condo residences atop rows of cafés and shops, with fresh breezes wafting in from nearby Keating Channel, refurbished and cleaned up to accommodate new wetland habitat.
It’s a good sales pitch, but Toronto’s waterfront has been under development for more than a century and city planners have never come close to matching a Parisian boulevard. Outside of the old Toronto neighbourhoods and existing high streets, where real city living takes place, New Toronto Style is all glass and concrete with limited street life. As the Gardiner plans show, the proposals for the area, including the Port Lands, are all variations on New Toronto Style.
The alternative to the “remove” fantasy is known as the “hybrid” option. The hybrid proposal, supported by Mayor John Tory, retains the continuous flow of traffic from the Don Valley to the Gardiner. Some ramps would be altered east of the Don Valley, but the elevated expressway would remain and travel times in years to come would be close to current levels — not great, but better than the slowdowns anticipated under the remove option, including four years of congestion causing deconstruction diversions.
Whether the mayor will get council support at next week’s meetings remains to be seen. Torontonians can expect the usual at the council sessions: gross rhetorical overkill, interminably delivered, from all angles — left, right and centre.
A number of current and former city officials have expressed personal and official views. The Board of Health supports removal, as does the city’s chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat. The planning department itself has no official view, but Keesmaat has personally joined assorted luminaries, anti-car activists and the environmental movement, including former mayor David Crombie, in opposition to the mayor and in favour of Gardiner removal.
It’s a city divided. On Monday, Mr. Tory will attempt to set the scene in his favour when he delivers a major speech to the Toronto Board of Trade, which also supports the hybrid option. He has a strong case.
For starters, the mayor could take a run at the bloated financial numbers his critics are using to undermine the hybrid option. Former Toronto chief planner Paul Bedford, a remover, likes to claim the remove option will save the city $500-million to $700-million. That saving is based on relatively meaningless 100-year life-cycle estimates of costs based on something called “uninflated” 2013 dollars. The cost of the hybrid option, including 100 years’ worth of maintenance, is said to be $919-million of these un-inflated dollars. The cost of the remove option is said to be $461-million, leaving a $500-million free lunch sitting on the table that Mr. Bedford claims could be spent on a new waterfront LRT or on repairs to crumbling cityowned housing units.
These numbers are, however, economic balderdash. As the May 6 city staff report on the Gardiner makes abundantly clear, the cost difference between the two options is likely less than $100-million, based more meaningfully on what economists call net present value dollars. Net present value dollars “is one of the most reliable measures used in project decision-making,” says the staff report, because it allows one to “compare alternatives along the same basis.”
The table nearby illustrates this more accurate cost difference, being the gap between $336-million for hybrid versus $240-million for remove. The margin of error is worth noting: plus or minus 20%, a variance that makes political polling look like clairvoyance. It’s possible, allowing for the margins of error, that there is no difference in cost between the two options.
There is no doubt: There is no $500-million mountain of cash to be mined if the east Gardiner were torn down.
For drivers, in fact, there are a lot of other costs not accounted for in the tabulations, including the cost to motorists and trucking companies of increased congestion, slower travel times and diversions that will follow removal of the Gardiner. City documents estimate that cost at $37-million a year.
The congestion issue is also significantly fudged in the official reports, not deliberately but simply because of inherent complexity. But the issue is clear: “The principle disadvantage of the Remove alternative is the slower vehicle travel times during peak hours,” says the last staff report.
At first glace, the traveltime differences seem marginal. Tearing down the Gardiner, it is said, will add only three minutes to the time it will take to travel to downtown from Don Mills and Eglinton in the year 2031. The added time from Victoria Park and Kingston will increase five minutes. Under the hybrid plan, these travel times increases are lower or non-existent.
The assumptions behind these forecasts, however, are big and complicated. For example, by 2031 it is assumed that the subway relief line will be built, the waterfront LRT will be in place, upgraded Go Train service will be operating and the Broadview streetcar will extend south. Even before 2031, the remove option will virtually shut down the Gardiner during four years (minimum) of construction.
In addition, it is assumed that many drivers who now come down the Don Valley Parkway and onto the Gardiner will, by 2031, be using alternative routes into the city. Instead of scooting down to the Gardiner to get into the city core, they will get off at the Bayview extension to enter the city via Rosedale Valley Road or River Street, or take the Richmond exit further south.
One reason drivers and shippers would begin using other routes into town is that, if the elevated expressway was removed, the number of vehicles that could be accommodated by the tree-lined boulevard would be sharply reduced. The current rush hour peak on the Gardiner is around 5,000. Along the boulevard, the capacity will be perhaps 3,000 vehicles, creating traffic slowdowns and congestion.
This reduced Gardiner capacity, and the diversion of traffic to city streets and other routes, has downtown business operators and transportation industry officials worried. The risk of disruption to the downtown economy is genuine if the incentive is created for business to seek more accessible locations in Markham and Mississauga.
There is, of course, much more to the east Gardiner decision crisis than dollars and congestion. It was made all the more difficult 25 years ago when the surrounding area was hijacked by environmental bureaucracies and activists whose primary objectives were to “naturalize” the mouth of the Don River, curb the use of automobiles, increase transit and cycling, and turn the Port Lands and the city-owned area around the Gardiner into highdensity high-rise habitats for humans and, if possible, fish.
Next week’s vote will not be the final decision on the Gardiner. But every great city needs a great highway entrance. Unlike Montreal and Vancouver, Toronto has no dramatic bridges. We have the Gardiner and we should keep it.
The Gardiner can handle 5,000 vehicles an hour, but the boulevard only 3,000