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Removing the gardiner: a thread
The numbers here reported by the media vary, but just considering the lifecycle cost of the infrastructure itself, the Dillon report shows that the hybrid option will reach $919 million (in 2013 dollars)—whereas the teardown will come to $461 million.
When you consider that a number of developers have lined up to reimagine the waterfront area in the absence of the elevated expressway, the numbers fall even more heavily toward removal. Also, consider the yearly saved costs from maintenance.
Dillon estimates that removing the expressway will create an extra 2 to 3 minutes of delay during the morning rush-hour over the hybrid option come 2031.
It feels even less significant when considering the small share of commuters who rely on the Gardiner to get into work. Dillon estimates it at 5,200 cars an hour—or just 3 percent of all morning commute trips.
As New York City traffic guru Sam Schwartz told a Toronto Globe and Mail reporter, in reference to the teardown of an elevated highway in Manhattan decades back, “there was this disappearing effect that we could not quite trace.”
This “disappearing traffic” phenomenon has been studied carefully. A 2002 paper, which looked at 70 case studies of reallocating road space from general traffic cars to other modes, reported a median traffic reduction of 11 percent and an overall average decline of 22 percent.
The roadway will gobble $2.2 billion of the transportation department’s 10-year capital spend. That’s 44 per cent of the total, although the highway carries only about seven per cent of commuters in and out of downtown, according to city figures.
Eighteen kilometres of freeway, seven of them elevated, will cost taxpayers more than Toronto’s other 5,379 kilometres of roadway — including the ground-hugging DVP — combined.
