It may be an
award that no-one wants to win, but who are the most long-suffering
commuters in Ontario? Because of their sheer numbers, regular users
of Highway 401 can claim they experience the most unreliable traffic
conditions. Whether in Toronto, Oshawa, Windsor or near Kitchener,
congestion and construction make the 401 a real challenge to
navigate.
Commuters in
Ottawa may feel that the Queensway, a.k.a. King’s Highway 417, is
their own personal gauntlet -- but when it comes ongoing gridlock
and an extra-long rush hour, I think the Gardiner Expressway in
downtown Toronto takes the cake. In fact, most of the highway’s
length -- from Yonge Street to near the city’s western border with
Mississauga -- has earned a reputation for challenging motorists.
Remember when
Mike Harris used his common sense and dumped highways all across
Ontario into the laps of local municipalities? Many, many kilometers
of this formerly provincial pavement was in lousy shape, and
councils everywhere had little choice but to rename, renumber and
repave these cast-off roads.
The easternmost
section of the Queen Elizabeth Way, the part of the road inside the
City of Toronto, was in particularly bad condition. The
Conservatives downloaded this extra-wide highway -- it has
provincial-style Collector and Express lanes -- onto the the city,
accompanied by a little note asking local taxpayers to care for it.
The City of
Toronto still hasn’t gathered the funds to repair the “New”
Gardiner’s fundamentally cracked road base and concrete surface.
Drivers coming in from Burlington, Stoney Creek or New York State
are surely impressed upon entering Ontario’s capital.
At least their
eyes -- if not their spines -- are soon distracted by the sight of
the city’s downtown, followed by the unique experience of driving
right into the midst of the highrise skyline.
This fall
Toronto city council must once again address the future of this
road, one of several candidates for the title of Toronto’s all-time
“mistake by the lake.” Elevated above what was mostly industrial
waterfront land in the 1950s, the Gardiner Expressway thrilled the
locals with its American-style engineering and ability to whisk them
to the burgeoning suburbs.
Now it is
chronically crowded, and rush hour starts around 2 p.m. for those
heading out of town to the west. It’s not so bad going east, until
after joining the northbound Don Valley Parkway and its similarly
early afternoon gridlock.
The challenge
is that the Gardiner is now a half-century old, and decades of road
salt, pounding from vehicles and exposure to the elements have taken
their toll. Construction crews have kept the thing up, although at
times great chunks of concrete have crashed to the ground below,
including onto busy Lake Shore Boulevard. The old road has been in
limbo for so long that even its strange orange-y streetlamps have
become antiques, as city engineers wait for a decision on the
highway’s fate.
An easternmost
stump of the Gardiner was removed over the last ten years, through
what has become Toronto’s film district, where studios are soon to
be joined by new residential areas in the still-industrial Portlands
area east of the city core. When the 1.5 kilometer Gardiner East was
slated to come down, there was much caterwauling and fear-mongering
about inevitable gridlock and delayed commutes.
Once the city
finally sorted out the replacement surface intersections, I haven’t
heard a peep about congestion there. However, dismantling the
elevated road in the heart of the financial district involves a lot
more vehicles, and the impending debate will go to the heart of the
city’s values. Coming up: The right to drive downtown.
Ed Drass
edrass@nationalpost.com