Drop it I tell ya. Drop it buddy

Its a magnificent struggle for lunacy. Some want the Gardiner East section to be removed. Some, like the furious Mayor, want a hybrid. Sort of a highway mule with no fertility.

Like you, I could really care less. But what is distressing from a third party standpoint is that both sides are trotting out the BS. The advocates for the mule give numbers about time increases. Advocates for removal trot out minimal figures.

Worse still is the fanciful project costs. Everyone on every side seems to be giving rather low estimates of their options. Going on history, City history, I'll betcha dollars to donuts* that those are about one third to one quarter of the final real costs of each project.

Reason. That is  particularly complex topography to build anything since it is also at the mouth of a small, albeit definable river mouth. Worse still, they have to work around existing infrastructure maintaining some traffic flow.

In all the arguments, I don't think people seem to regard that section of the highway as part of the entire highway system from Montreal and Ottawa to Windsor, to Sarnia, to Fort Erie.

The debaters seem to argue about six hours out of a 24 hour period. And the removers seem to say, well everyone will have to start earlier without adding the ever so critical point of saying that people will go from work to home even later. The cherry on this little sundae gem is the fact that they are pointing to public transit the same day that the vaunted TTC subway system collapsed because it seems no one has a cell phone. 

Had all the stations were equipped with cell phone service the supervisors could have bypassed. No. Seems out of all the TTC supervisors on staff none have cell phones or use them. They could ask the customers to use those cells to move trains. Nope.

In off peak, night hours a lot of truck traffic flows down and up the DVP/Gardiner Queen Elizabeth corridor. Not all. But about 1/4 of trans-city traffic to Niagara slides down through. Trucks from up north come down the 400, 404 at night and off peak hours, they choose which way to go.

 

Some confused Ryerson puppies on the Star seem to hate the Gardiner for the most trivial reasoning. One columnist even cited how San Francisco should be the model because it no longer has its harbour expressway. The guy skirted around several things. First different geography SFO is on a peninsula. Second SFO is an end point of the ground transport system, Toronto is the major hub of the highway network in the middle of the highway network. Third, the reporter failed to give equal weight to Edmonton, Regina, Calgary, and Winnipeg which all have ring expressways to facilitate commercial traffic. Toronto has a functioning ring highway under several different names unfortunately. (401,DVP,Gardiner, 427)

Removing that section will move that commercial traffic all the way through Toronto and onto the hard pressed Hwy 427. Plus the advocates of the removal seem to believe that if they remove that part of the Gardiner, that removes all the traffic. Its just going to move it onto other streets where their precious TTC operates.

Neither side seems to stand up to the measure of reality. Its now more political than logical.