FLIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
Speedy new underground route to island airport opens,
When flyers touch down at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, they now have a sleek, speedy new option for getting to the mainland: the long-awaited pedestrian tunnel.
After the tunnel’s official opening Thursday afternoon, the six-minutes-or-less trip was met with praise from passengers and airline staff alike.
“We don’t have to wait for the ferry any more when we finish a long day,” said Porter flight attendant Amanda Kerrivan, fresh from a flight. (Ferries will remain an option, though.)
Built within the bedrock 30 metres below the lake, the tunnel is a bright, spacious route between mainland Toronto and the airport, allowing the public to stroll through or cross quickly on one of the four moving sidewalks — two in each direction — which travel at 2.3 kilometres an hour.
“All told this project represents a win for travellers, a win for the city, and a win for Torontonians in general,” PortsToronto chairman Mark McQueen said earlier that day during an invitation-only ribbon-cutting ceremony alongside Mayor John Tory and federal Minister of Transport Lisa Raitt.
Tory praised the project as one of many improvements coming to the waterfront: “The pedestrian tunnel has been a massive, complicated undertaking since construction began in 2012, and it really is one of those very unique infrastructure projects in all of Canada — the first of its kind in the country.”
At long last, as signs inside the tunnel stated, “there’s flight at the end of the tunnel.” However, the project certainly hasn’t been without critics.
Norman Di Pasquale, chair of antiisland airport expansion group NoJetsTO, said he doesn’t want to see the tunnel used as an “argument for expansion.”
“Expanding the airport with jets would ruin the balance of the waterfront,” he explained.
The project was also hit with delays. Officials initially suggested the tunnel could open by summer 2014, but construction took longer than expected, partly because of a particularly cold winter.
A tunnel of this scale comes with challenges, noted Paul Stevens, project director for ZAS Architects + Interiors. “It’s probably one of the most complex infrastructure projects you can ever imagine. You’re building a tunnel under a lake bed,” he said.
“We used very complex modelling software that has three-dimensional co-ordination to make sure we got exactly the right positioning of it, because if you’re drilling in the wrong spot, it’s going to come up in the wrong spot.”
The roughly 240-metre-long tunnel — that’s slightly longer than two football fields — is accessible by mainland elevators inside a new pavilion, and leads into a bright airport space offering a view of the downtown skyline.
The mainland and airport sides also feature historical elements, including a bronze sculpture of the airport’s namesake, Billy Bishop, with his friend, fellow flying ace William Barker, along with artifact-filled dis- play cases and a life-size hanging replica of a Newport-17 fighter plane.
The tunnel project cost $82.5 million and was built through a publicprivate partnership agreement between PortsToronto, Forum Equity Partners and lead contractor PCL.
Much of the funding came from airport improvement fees paid by passengers, meaning that taxpayers are not footing the bill. With files from Star staff