Just tear it down, already,

The keep-the-Gardiner crowd drives this tired debate onward, regardless of cold, hard facts

It’s the monster that ate our brains and devoured our senses. The Gardiner Expressway: an indomitable, seemingly unconquerable beast destined to tower over Toronto citizens for generations.

Tear it down. Bury it. Zip it up in a tunnel. Just be rid of it, please.

Such plaintive cries have fallen on tin ears since urbanists, planners, architects and engineers mounted a credible campaign to make the Gardiner teardown a kind of millennium project for Toronto.

It was to be part of Toronto’s waterfront revitalization. A renaissance. The stars were aligned. The new megacity. New politics.

The Three Amigos (Mel Lastman-Mike Harris-Jean Chrétien ) had somehow managed to unite along the Port Lands.

The skyscrapers were just starting to rise along the expressway route, all turning their backs on the mistake by the lake. Do it now or the naysayers will have another excuse. (They’ll say, “We can’t do it. The highway is too encumbered by buildings all around.”)

It seemed so possible. Some 15 years ago, thenmayor Mel Lastman said this about the monstrosity, a.k.a. the Gardiner Expressway:

“I was down there the other day and it looked like a piece of crap, and it costs a fortune to maintain.”

By the time the car lovers invoked the twin devils of “cost and traffic,” Lastman slinked off to North York and never bothered to look at the “piece of crap” anymore.

His successor David Miller looked into the belly of the beast and found no room for enlightened city building — not when he had to expend political capital on transit, housing, priority neighbourhoods, the environment and the like.

And so Miller proposed a partial teardown — do the east end, from the Don Valley Parkway to Jarvis. It would cost upwards of $300 million, but not near the $1.8-billion cost for a full take down of the entire elevated section out to the Ex.

Miller’s mistake was he sought to amputate the legs, not cut out the heart of the beast. Of course, it survived. Now, when the entire project should have been nearing completion, we are back debating day surgery versus radical transformation.

A new mayor, spouting daily procar doctrine even as the price of keeping the Gardiner rises above the cost of taking it down, is about to cement the highway’s future for another 30 to 50 years.

Funny how we grow to love our adversary. For many among us, life without the Gardiner Expressway is a mind-blowing thought. Where would the traffic go? What would we do? The economy would grind to a standstill. The city would become a Third World backwater.

In fact, the opposite would occur. A grand, new, never-before-imagined landscape would emerge where the concrete veil has eclipsed our imagining.

In 2006, when a report showed how easily we could take down the Gardiner and what it would unleash, then-city councillor Brian Ashton said:

“I’m a skeptic. But today, I’m a skeptic with goose bumps. This is exciting. I overestimated the role of the Gardiner. It doesn’t have a major impact on our travel time.”

Never has. As few as one in 10 vehicles, maybe two in 10, are actually travelling the entire distance from the Don River to the Humber. For years, those were the commut- ers who drove the debate. When a new teardown proposal estimated adding five or 10 minutes to the commuting times of this tiny group, it rendered the enterprise politically unpalatable.

The standard pushback to that argument — even when substantiated by experience or video evidence of non-existent rush-hour traffic — has been, “We don’t believe the numbers. The entire highway is needed.”

So now, one has to laugh out loud when one reads the following in the staff report as a reason for not supporting a tunnel that would whisk drivers through the corridor:

“Less than one-quarter of the traffic on the Gardiner uses it as a through-route; from commercial to recreational and business commuters, the majority of Gardiner travel demand is generated within and to destinations in the downtown core.”

In other words, the elevated section has way more capacity than we need.

And if you don’t believe that, try this: a tunnel would also have more capacity than we need.

So, spend billions maintaining a structure we don’t need.

It makes no sense to argue the numbers, costs, engineering possibility, potential, visions of a city released from the clutches of a last-century construct.

It’s been clear for some time. Nothing short of a revolutionary, city-loving mayor with guts and political capital to burn can get us the renaissance other cities have delivered while facing a similar challenge.

Put a bow on the pig all you want. It’ll never be good enough, even for a place called Hogtown. Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca