Not so much at stake in Gardiner
Pick one and build it. That’s the message city council needs to hear about the easternmost portion of the Gardiner Expressway, the future of which will come to a vote this week: tear it down and replace it with an eight-lane boulevard, thus interrupting the expressway link to the Don Valley Parkway; or realign that link in a more development-friendly way — those are city staff ’s two preferred options — and never look back.
There are good cases to be made for each approach: Mayor John Tory made a compelling one for the latter, so-called “hybrid” model in a lunch speech to the Empire Club on Monday, whereas you only have to look at the mockups to see that the boulevard is more aesthetically pleasing. But this is not a seminal moment in Toronto history; Tory is not flirting with a “tragic error,” as former mayor David Crombie suggested recently; it is certainly not the second coming of the Spadina Expressway debate. It is 1,700 metres of roadway. There is no city in the world whose future hinges on 1,700 metres of roadway. As Tory noted in his speech, Toronto has developed magnificently around the Gardiner. There’s no reason to think that would stop dead in its tracks at Jarvis Street.
If I have a preference, it’s marginally for the teardown. It’s a cheaper, more flexible option and the friendliest to developing the eastern waterfront. It would not impact a significant portion of commuters — just three per cent. If we accept the negative economic impact figure Tory cites — $37 million annually — we should note that it’s about 0.01 per cent of the Greater Toronto Area’s GDP, per the Brookings Institution.
The boulevardiers are a very tough lot to love, though. On Twitter Monday morning they were trading photos of the world’s “grand boulevards” — the Champs-Élysées, the Mall in London. Curiously absent was the nondescript portion of Lakeshore Boulevard East between the DVP and Leslie Street, above which the Gardiner once soared. Boulevards do not become grand unless we make them grand — and the Port Lands development plan with the hybrid Gardiner East in it is very nearly as grand as without it.
The hybrid Gardiner is about as inoffensive as elevated expressways get, and building it would be entirely in keeping with Toronto’s practical nature. Above all, it would save people and businesses time.
There has been widespread scoffing at the inconvenience commuters would face under the boulevard plan: two to three minutes’ delay in the morning, according to a staff report. But the estimate is based on the Downtown Relief Line, regional express rail along GO corridors, the Yonge North subway extension and the Waterfront East, Finch West and Sheppard East LRTs being up and running by the time we’re sipping our first prosecco on the boulevard. Any teardown supporters want to bet the farm on that?
Absent such improvements, an additional two-to-three minutes of delay is estimated. So let’s say it’s five minutes. For daily commuters that’s five minutes times five days a week times 49 weeks: 20 hours a year. That is nothing to scoff at.
The teardown crowd — dedicated city-builders, remember — also traffics in the infuriating false choice between building an expressway and investing in transit. The figure they throw around is $500 million, which is roughly the difference between the hybrid and boulevard models in uninflated 2013 dollars. Accepting it just for the sake of argument, $500 million doesn’t buy you a damn thing at the transit store. And it’s $500 million over 100 years! People who are serious about public transit in Toronto should be thinking in terms of tens of billions of dollars right now, not fetishizing a piddling $5 million a year.
“Great cities have both,” as Tory said Monday — both expressways and transit. Indeed many great cities have considerably more of the former, and nearly all have more of the latter. That remains a problem several orders of magnitude larger than anything building or not building the hybrid Gardiner East will cause. During the mayoral election campaign, Tory noted in his speech, maintaining the Gardiner East was good enough for Doug Ford, Olivia Chow and David Soknacki. It cannot now be a looming disaster. So pick one. And build it.
The hybrid would save people and businesses time