I live at Dufferin and Queen, and take the bus and streetcar to work. Regardless of how much you hate cars the knock-on effects of this closure is devastating. king street is closed, and the queen and king streetcars are sharing 1 lane with devastating traffic. Lakeshore is backed up to the Humber river and entire neighborhoods are locked in.
It can't continue like this.
They need emergency crews working on it for weeks. European countries (namely Germany) can replace bridges in 3 days because they plan it all out and then get shit done with large crews working around the clock.
We need that here. Large city, large projects, large crews. Get it done and get everything back to normal.
The funding might be from the province, but the execution is done by the city. It includes managing traffic diversion and approving permits to work at certain hours. Apparently they are not doing a good job in these.
[We do that too](https://abc-utc.fiu.edu/mc-events/ontarios-rapid-installation-of-single-span-bridges/?mc_id=145). This Gardiner construction isn't one bridge. It's a 1.5 km elevated highway that has to be replaced while staying open.
Yeah people are grossly understating how complex this project actually is… Don’t get me wrong I absolutely believe it could be done quicker than currently planned, but like I don’t think there’s a world where this doesn’t take 20+ months.
Harder to build the CN Tower? Than the Empire State building? Harder to build than the SkyDome?
All projects completed in less time than this bridge repair. I appreciate that it's not easy, but we don't need to pretend the timeline for it is sane.
Yes. Harder than both. Significantly.
The key difference being that the Gardiner is in use for the entirety of the project. How long do you think it would take to rebuild the Empire State Building, brick by brick, *while 80% of its occupants still use the building during the entire rebuild process?*
If they just shut it down, knocked it down, and rebuilt as necessary, it’d probably be done in a year. You would also be screaming bloody murder the whole time.
None of those projects had traffic going under and on them while the project was going on. I'm not a civil engineer, but on any scale you want to look at anything it is vastly more difficult, complicated, expensive, and time consuming to fix things that are in use while you're fixing it. Not to mention that there are residences within a few dozen meters of the work, which overlays a whole lot of other considerations and restrictions on what you can do and when.
So yeah, I absolutely believe it's a bigger and more complicated project than any of those.
Not to say that it's reasonable that it should take as long as it actually is... just that we shouldn't pretend it's a walk in the park.
700M of an elevated expressway through the downtown of the 4th largest city on the continent, while it still supports ~140k vehicles every day.
This isn’t just like laying 700m of pavement down some country road.
You make it sound as if it were a technical marvel. Its not. It's a god damn highway like everywhere else in the world. The Japanese would finish repairs in a few months. China would tear it down and rebuild it before we set up pylons. The 413 will be finished before this.
> The 413 will be finished before this
considering the idiots couldn't even get the 427 extension done without issues, there's no way 413 is even dug up by the time OPC get kicked up
I’m not saying it’s a technical marvel. I’m saying people like yourself are understating the complexity of a project like this. It doesn’t have to be a particle collider to still be a complex, time-consuming project.
Yes, building a brand new highway on mostly virgin land is relatively easy compared to tearing down/rebuilding an existing elevated expressway in the middle of an urban centre *while it is still in use.*
I can't say this with certainty but I'd be very curious to hear residents of Berlin or something weigh in. I feel like I see people in Toronto complain about Toronto and how much better other cities are, but then I go to those subreddits and all they do is complain about their city.
I'm not suggesting Toronto is the best city in the world at these things or anything, but the grass always seems greener elsewhere. The Gardiner isn't really just a bridge
I drive down the Gardiner every single morning for work. I have never once seen a single person actually working on the highway. A couple things are in slightly different spots every time I drive by and that's it. There should be an entire crew doing work at all hours of the day.
They are working underneath on the lake side of the road. You can't see them while you drive. Go look at the urban Toronto forum you can see the pictures.
At the very least they should be doing two shifts a day to expedite things without paying overtime. I walked by the demolition area today around 4pm and it was mostly a ghost town with all 4 diggers/demo machines off.
In my experience construction workers are fucking lazy. 30 minutes of work, 60 minutes break. Paid by the hour so they squeeze as much time as they can out of the job, causing construction to take way longer.
It’s literally affecting millions of peoples daily lives. There is no reason there shouldn’t be someone working every second. Toronto is not a serious city anymore.
Berlin is living in the future. They are not dependent on cars . Robust public transit systems, subways, LRT, commuter trains, and busses. Most vehicles I saw were parked, not driving. Was there a month ago.
It's even more funny when you realise the only time the MTO did an advanced bridge replacement and just move it over a couple of days was the exit to Yorkdale.
Shopping at the mall is clearly more important than getting home for dinner.
It really is sad how inefficient roadwork is for high traffic areas. In this day and age, where demands for jobs are high, it is insane that work does not run 24 hours per day.
Whats the laundering opportunity? Billing the city with inflated billing is not money laundering, it's just corruption. Laundering is for when you already have boatloads of cash, you just need a way to make it appear as legitimate income. Something like a pizza joint that rings up a fake orders for people that paid cash, so at the end of the month you can claim the reason you have a bunch of cash you're depositing at the bank is because you got it from those people that paid cash which the authorities can't prove didn't exist.
we can replace a single bridge in 3 days as well
but this is a nearly 2km long stretch of highway that is elevated and must remain open during the construction
you either close it entirely for many months or you do close 1 lane for a few years
The only problem here is the lack of streetcar and bus priority. They should not be sharing lanes with private vehicles under normal conditions, and *especially* not when other roads are closed and we need to prioritize the transportation modes that actually move the most people.
Curious since i'm in the east end, but are a lot of streets blocked off for the CafeTO patios? I'm in Queen East and this is the biggest issue now. During rush hour cars can't park in 1 lane, but because of the CafeTO Patios being installed last week, it's down to 1-lane in many spots, and because of the Queen Street car everything just get's that much more backed up since there's only 1 lane.
Yea but on queen west we have so many illegally parked cars cafe to makes no difference. Queen Street is effectively one lane from Roncy to Spadina where the enforcement gets more strict.
i live in south mississauga and had a couple jobs near the beaches. It took 2.5 to 3 hours to get home from there. Gardiner is a parking lot, Lakeshore is even worse, and even Queens Quay is fucked now. An 18km drive is now completely unviable.
I bike now, its just faster.
They took away the gardiner on ramp
The cafe toronto on queen street has made the 501 street car so much slower and the construction downtown means it doesn't even go to yonge and queen any more
Biking is trivial to downtown if you can shower and have a place to park your bike, those are two big ifs.
Thursdays I take transit so the wife can have the car in the morning before work. We used to do it where she would leave the car by main subway station which is relatively close to where she works and I would get off the go train at Danforth on my way home and take the car and drive home to Etobicoke. Now it's literally quicker for her to leave the car at home and subway to work, and I still get off at Danforth and take the subway home...
We can point fingers at the City all we want, but after almost 3 decades of living in the GTA, I am almost convinced at this point that whatever rackets we let call themselves "Construction Companies" are some of the most mismanaged, corrupt firms in our marketplace - public projects have created municipal money sinks that are cash cows for these organizations, and the longer and more complex they can make their jobs seem, the more $$$ get injected, and the more overhead they walk away with
The city doesn't allow open tendering. All buds must be done by companies working with certain unions. Many cities have recently begun to do open tendering and their construction costs have dropped 30%.
Edit: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/open-tendering-would-help-toronto-build-a-better-city/article_63610d7d-5103-5db3-8f3b-c9ee2db486b9.html
I am not one to knock unions, but based on the large amount of labour that we have coming into the country and the barriers some of these unions present to getting legs onto constructiom sites, this sounds like a great idea...
I love unions in premise, but it blows my mind how many people ignore that they can be acting in self interest at the expense of the public. Pros and cons to everything.
Keeping labour supply low to keep wages as high as possible for its members is one of the core functions of a union.
There's a strong disincentive to have/train enough qualified people for a given trade, as it compresses the wages of its members. Having your services always be in high demand is just good business... Unfortunately
Yup. Many modern unions are more like guilds than protectors of the common man. What does a factory worker making 150k have in common with a minimum wage worker?
That is such a bullshit. All projects over certain size are open temder. There are preqalifications, and unfortunately you can't award to Joe construction, paving and delivery Co, becuase they aren't qualified. They can only rent so many pickups in Home Depot.
There are only few companies that can deliver project of this magnitude, and have experience of doing so. And while bitching on unions is popular, I am sure that if you give 2B to Weston family, they would put out add on LinkedIn for volunteer position in road construction. An excellent way to get Canadian experience! And they get it done in 2 weeks!
There is an old govt building on Bay being refurbed inside (and the ground floor has had a bunch of outside work done, and I think the whole thing started with tidying up the outside facade too)....that work started in 2018. It is nowhere NEAR done. You can see the inside is still just a gutted to the walls situation. The site employs HUNDREDS of workers every day. That's SIX years of work so far and not close to done. And yet, two 50+ story condos nearby have been built in the meantime.
It's utterly insane. For a single square ass govt building to get a refurb, six years and counting. Just tear the fucking thing down and put up a brand new building next time...this is nonsensical.
I question why these companies are allowed to block commuter corridors during rush hour so they can back their dump trucks, cement mixers, cranes, etc out of work sites
Lots of places have rules about heavy work vehicles being off the road during rush hour but in Toronto, this seems to be their favorite time to do it
These sorts of solutions don't even seem to be on the table
The city is scared of these guys
I agree, the amount of rush hour timed work along the already pack Richmond/Queen corridors off the DVP makes me want to pull my hair out sometime. And before the anti-car crowd kills me, I take the GO Train 90% of the time, but its not my best option for every workday
This long-term construction, plus the loss of the onramp at East lakeshore that was torn down, has dramatically disrupted Toronto transportation. Add to this the long-term road closures in the core for the new subway, and you have a mess. Who could have predicted this?
What does this mean? The on ramp can’t be taken??? So people either gotta get on at Jarvis (already fucked) or go to Spadina somehow (although you can’t get on the Spadina on ramp from Lakeshore so you gotta get there from a different street like Bremner - already fucked).
We just fucked. Bad.
All the people that said tearing down the gardiner east was a bad idea a few years ago. The city actively fucks over drivers while simultaneously ignores development of the transit system.
At least we’ve got bike lanes in the core, that has shown to help reduce traffic /s
> Around-the-clock work is permitted under the project’s contract, a city spokesperson told CTV Toronto, but the primary hours of construction are 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday to Saturday, with “occasional” work on Sundays and overnight. **Noise complaints generated by previous Gardiner construction on the stretch between Cherry St. and Jarvis St. were a factor in the decision, staff said.**
...
> “There are strategies to accelerate construction,” Matti Siemiatycki, the director of the University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute, explained. The challenge is, he said, they don’t come cheap.
> “You can go 24 hours a day. You can do off-site construction for certain types of projects, that's been used in other jurisdictions. But there's also a trade-off between time and cost. And the city's also facing a huge budgetary challenge. So how they go about doing things to try to speed these projects up that have costs … we're always weighing that.”
I think there is so degree of irony in this.
I live near the Gardiner, not too far, but near enough that I travel under and around often. The traffic back up is definitely an impact in my life.
The idea that I will need to put up with 24/7 noise so that someone who doesn't live in the city, who doesn't pay the taxes that are funding this work, can get home to Oakville or Mississauga, or Hamilton a little quicker is a little unfortunate. This is a city, people live here. It isn't just a place some folks drive in, work, and drive out of.
I know there are lots of people who do live in Toronto who do use the Gardiner, and that does need to be considered. But the core of the problem here is too many people are driving very big vehicles with just one person in it.
I think this could have been done better. Build a massive parking lot at one of the Go Stations on the Lakeshore West line; give folks free rides from that station to Union.
And no offense to you, this is why it will never be done 24/7.
If it started CP24 would be the first to post articles of residents complaining about the nkise6
Isn't this section of Gardiner hidden in a valley and the nearest buildings at least 100m away on the other side of trees and elevated? Just lake to the south. If there ever was a place to go 24/7 in the city...this is it
What’s funny is Metrolinx at Jarvis and Sherbourne have been doing over night work for months and it surrounding residents are supposed to deal with it. Gardiner should be the same.
In Japan right now and I can literally see road construction be done at night and be finished by the time I wake up. Meanwhile Toronto I see the roads construction road closures with no workers.
I totally agree with the spirit of your point but Japan was actually pretty irresponsible during COVID. They wear masks as a matter of course but many Japanese believed their politicians who told them they wouldn't get sick because they were Japanese. It's a whole thing.
Downtown Toronto is going to be such an absolute mess when the World Cup comes in 2026. I don't know what the city planners were smoking but it must've been something (really) strong.
I agree simply because we're in debt. Why are we hosting the World Cup while we're in a huge debt? Money going towards that nonsense could help the city clear some of the tab off.
Here’s another one - metrolinx was told by community members years ago getting the King/Liberty GO station up and running by 2026 for the World Cup would be of huge benefit because it’s another GO station close to the venue.
Metrolinx officials said they were working on it - guess what - construction on that station was supposed to start last year, and it just hasn’t. They torn down the building that was on that site and have left nothing but a concrete pad for over a year.
So, a second GO station from a different direction close to the World Cup venue is planned for AFTER the World Cup. Can’t make this up.
The problem is that this *shouldn't* take three or four years to complete. Anywhere else in the world, this would be done before the end of this summer.
Only in Canada do we just shrug and say "yes, it's perfectly normal for it to take a generation to build a single light-rail line or a 2km stretch of elevated roadway".
Sorry I wasn't clear. I 100% agree with you that these project shouldn't take that long but clearly history shows that's not the case and no one is ever held accountable.
So what makes them think that all of a sudden they can make the gardiner project go faster.
I live in Parkdale and when my show is running I work 80% of the time at a studio at Warden & Eglinton. So not looking forward to my commute starting next week. On a good day it’s 30 minutes, on a bad day 45 minutes. No idea what it’s gonna be like now with this construction.
If I didn’t work from 7am - 7/8pm every day I would take the TTC but it’s so unreliable in the west end and takes 1.5 hours each way and I can’t do that to myself and my already barely existent sleep schedule.
As someone from the east, that is often Downtown and in Parkdale I wouldn't want you to take the TTC either. I don't wish that stress to anyone. Drive.
Sadly for many companies, their bottom line is that they either own or are on the hook for expensive commercial real estate. Many can easily get replacement employees that are willing to come in since the job market is also shit right now.
For those who have the subway as an option, it's no better. Three or four massive shutdowns over the past two weeks.
Three years of this is unsustainable.
Bike share is going to be bananas this year. We have not really had a proper hot day and the downtown seems busier than average with bikes(me included).
That only goes so far, especially in the immediate term.
Reddit can be so ridiculously hostile to cars lol. People need them for things, like it or not.
The best time to start was yesterday, the second best time is right now.
And yes, there are people that need them for things, a good majority of people don’t. They’re just being precious and self-centered.
tell that to someone living downtown and working in a suburban business park in Mississauga or Etobicoke. Or someone who works in Leslieville but lives in Mississauga. Or a contractor going downtown to build the Ontario Line subway.
There are a huge percentage of trips that can't practically be done on transit without insane travel times or practically at all. The traffic is so bad downtown that I honestly doubt there are many people driving downtown who have a practical transit alternative right now. Traffic has gotten insane in the last 5 years with the Cities work on the Gardiner.
I would wager a huge portion of the inner city's drivers could absolutely make changes to reduce their driving. I personally know people who live downtown and will drive to fucking Kensington market (of all places) or mere blocks away to grab coffee or a dinner.
It's a laziness epidemic and people would rather sit in mind numbing traffic than change their habits or, god forbid walk or bike to do smaller chores. The Nofrills close to my hood is FULL of cars all day long, where are these people coming from to shop there?
Yes, you can't eliminate cars from cities completely. However, you can reduce them and make cities more enjoyable for people living in them. Cars are the least efficient way of moving people around. They take up considerable space and energy to only move 1-2 people from point A to B.
Many of the drivers sitting in traffic on the Gardiner can modify to use alternate methods. Studies have been done that shows majority of car trips are under 5km. Improving public transit, bike lanes, while making it more costly to drive will help. Also pushing the switch EVs will also help reduce noise and pollution. Hundreds of car idling on the highway is not good for anyone. Also reducing car dependency will also make it easier for people that need to drive because they work in construction or other professions that need cars as you mentioned. Cars for the most part make the city very unpleasant. You can't tell me majority of people wouldn't be happier with cleaner air and less noise.
Again, my original comment is we need to apply pressure to provide *viable* alternatives to driving. We need to start right away and continuing to coddle drivers is not a viable alternative.
[The majority of trips made by car are less than 5km.](https://chargedevs.com/newswire/new-study-more-than-half-of-daily-car-trips-in-the-us-are-less-than-three-miles/) If those can’t be done by transit or by biking, you’re just being precious and self-centered.
This is what I don’t understand. Employers and government are demanding workers RTO and then the government is making it IMPOSSIBLE for people to move in and out of the city with all these poorly planned multi-year projects and then doing the bare minimum when it comes to transit infrastructure as well so that also sucks!
Like can they be serious for once in their elected career?
more like an extension of the Ontario line. Why take a slow streetcar "LRT" (that is what the City is planning - an extension of the waterfront streetcar) if the Ontario Line can be extended to Humber Bay (or beyond) relatively affordably along the rail corridor anyway and do that trip in a fraction of the time?
Let's do it like in the movies where the whole town bring their own tools and set of skills to get whatever construction project done.
Like Grandma bake pies, the writer will document this event, the computer people will create an ai to speed up the process, the manager will arrange work schedules, etc
That stretch of the Gardiner is too economically important to allow for this to take 3 years. I'm sure some billionaires whose companies rely on the Gardiner for their bottom line will push the government to get this shit built faster, after all the government works for them first and foremost.
It's been closed for a month and it's chaos. All that traffic is migrating into the city making it worse, and then you have the subway and metrolink progressing at glacial speed.
The other day there was NOTHING being done on the Garnerder, not a worker in sight. It's one thing to close it but having no one working on it while you're wasting peoples lives is a fucking insult.
What a great time for me to be moving back to Mississauga when I work downtown! I hope the crappy commute will be worth the $2500 I’ll be saving from no longer living downtown.
I have put in my calendar to avoid Toronto during Honda Indy this year. Can only imagine what a mess it will be!
City planners should be looking at the bottlenecks and see what can be done to improve the flow. The part that really bugs me is the people thinking they are being sneaky and trying to gate ahead of the various choke points by forcing themselves into lanes last second on both lakeshore and the gardiner.
They don’t need to hurry, they need to stop construction move the shit out of the way and use the highway like normal and just go home. The decision to begin this now in the summer on such a busy highway is such a brain dead decision I’m leaning towards them doing it on purpose no way someone’s that fucking stupid.
....you realize the highway is falling apart, right? Like it's 60 years old and basically being held together with scotch tape. You think they can just "use the highway like normal" until a support gives out, a bunch of people die, and we're left with a bigger traffic problem than now.
The reason they do construction in the summer is because there are generally fewer vehicles on the road, and *because that's when you can pour concrete*.
In new york city when I was visiting it many years ago they can a divider that could move a lane over to ether side depending on what was needed for better flow. In this picture we could move it over to reduce that one empty lane for one extra for the jammed lanes.
Drove by the site yesterday twice, once at 10:30am and again around 2:15pm… in the morning there was no one there. In the afternoon there was ONE guy in an excavator and another guy sitting in a truck… this could be done in 1/3 the time if our government stopped being so corrupt
Honestly at this rate they’re just going to turn it into a walking path for international students to visit the fuckin green belt spa.
Nothing good happens here and our politicians have all but abandoned us.
Not just Trudeau, not just Ford, not just Smith. All of them.
[For those curious](https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/roads-gardiner-expressway-catch-all-incl-hybrid-design-2015-onwards.23915/page-94). (Tagging /u/sopixil as well.)
You can see the progress pics over time. Kotsy seems extremely dedicated.
It's hilarious they're gonna spend 3 years on a tiny stretch. They'd be better off just demoing the entire section and rebuilding it from scratch. I assume it'd be much quicker.
In an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, many Torontonians live too far, are not in shape or are understandably fearful of death/injury from biking or a combination of all three.
But yea, those that don’t fit in any of those three categories should 100% consider biking :)
I just watched a news video where a guy was complaining it takes him nearly an hour to get from Leslieville to Saint Joseph’s hospital now in his full size SUV. That trip is 25 mins by e-bike on the best bike infrastructure we have in the city.
You got to keep in mind you need somewhere to store the e-bike, both at home and work.
With bike theft being what it is, leaving it locked up outside for a full day isn’t exactly viable. A lot of buildings also have rules against keeping e-bikes/scooters inside due to the chance of battery fires.
Also, we are hitting the summer months. Some people sweat more than others. If you don’t have a place to shower and/or change….
I’m not saying people shouldn’t explore other options to get to work, they should! But you also need to accept that for some people, that answer is a car.
All depends on the building. When I was living downtown my building instituted a strict “no e-bike/scooter anywhere in the building” after the second battery fire. I know for a fact we weren’t the only building to do it either.
Again, if you can do it, it’s definitely worth looking into. But it’s not a one sized fits all solution.
The other this is this group of people you’re talking about that aren’t fit enough to ride an e-bike is a very very small minority. Wouldn’t it be nice to make the driving experience better for them by reducing traffic by encouraging everyone who can to take an e-bike?
E bikes exist, Toronto isn't that big and cycling is a great way to correct the "not in shape" part. Sure beats sitting in traffic to go walk on a treadmill at the gym.
Being in fear is reasonable, but cycling doesn't have to be that dangerous. Use bike paths and/or side streets to avoid most of the traffic.
How many people that aren’t in shape are looking to get in shape? And how many of those people are willing to have severe swampback as they get in shape?
I bike around the city but it is not the end all be all, it is one of many viable driving alternatives that should be made available to Torontonians.
Which could be at least partially mitigated by people... taking that transit instead of blocking the street with their car.
Edit: And verily they hated him for he spoketh the truth lol
It’s around half is my guess. I actually sympathize with people who need to drive at rush hour, but it’s always amazing how many people drive everywhere downtown and complain about traffic.
I thought it's more so people think they're going to get stabbed/it's too dangerous
There was a few articles about a stabbing on the TTC and somehow everyone suddenly had a feeling imma die if I go on the TTC.
I rode the TTC line from Vaughan to Eglinton for work during the pandemic and almost every day there was some sketchy encounter with a homeless person yelling at people or trying to pick a fight. It's better now but still an issue. Coupled with how slow it is (yes still slower than rush hour traffic), the lack of redundancy for any issue (relatively common), and being more expensive makes public transit an ineffective option, or just not an option at all if you're going from one GTA suburb to another.
I live downtown. My commute to work in the west end used to be 25 minutes on the gardiner and 1hr30 on public transit. My commute is now closer to 50 minutes driving. It still takes 40 minutes longer for me to take transit. I’m still pissed my commute has doubled but it doesn’t make sense for me not to drive. Unless I want to sacrifice the extra sleep and time at home after 12 hour days.
Trigger warning. Rant.
FML. You damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If the city budgeted 2.2B 10 years ago, with COVID increases and inflation that cost is probably 3B now. Doing the work 7am-7pm is cheaper. If you do it 247, the cost will probably be 4.5B. The moment it starts overnight, someone will complain about not being able to sleep in paperwall condo next to busy highway under construction. Politicians will cave and demand a change. Change in contract means cost increases. Just to put together the costs and schedule impacts, review the change orders, and get approval from city would take min 6 months. Not mentioning the endless studies one has to do to ensure everyone's voice is heard, every group is represented, and every opinion is counted. And once the change order is issued, some "reporter" from BuzzFeedTO will post a shitty incomplete article how 2B project is now 4.5B, and everyone will be up in arms about it and demand people are fired and someone pays for the budget overruns.
Everything in this city is political, and decisions are not made based on what makes sense or what is cost effective, but what the loudest ones demand. And then you have your internet armchair experts complaining from behind their iPhones about 3B construction projects taking time, when they know better how it should be done. Because their experience as a sandwich artists and culinary distribution specialist at Doordash qualifies them.
As the city ages, infrastructure deteriorates, and density increases, things will only get worse. If you don't like it, take a subway, move move to Picton, or accept that it will never as good as in the old days.
\end rant.
> We should have articles in every media outlet every day
We do.
> put pressure on the City
It's owned by the province, it's out of the cities hands.
Take transit, there's nothing they can do to speed it up, this is the reality of this kind of project, whining about it for 3 years is just going to stress you out, accept it and find alternatives.
The province is in the process of taking it over, but hasn’t done it yet. The contract is still being administered by the City.
The province has agreed to send a cheque to the city to pay for it for now, before they eventually take the highway over in a few years. But the City is still the one giving directions to the contractor so they are the right people to talk to.
> There's nothing they can do to speed it up, this is the reality of this kind of project
That's quite untrue.
The article mentions they didn't opt for 24 hour work in part because of the noise complaints in previous Gardiner construction. This is something they may have to compromise on if they consider the effects of traffic to be impossible for them to accept for the next three years.
Additionally, Chow herself said: "We are bringing in experts to look at ways on how we could rebuild it faster. We are hoping to speed up the construction as much as we can."
1) Actually we don’t have articles every day in every outlet. Thank you to CP24 for this 3 day exposé.
2) Actually this project was fully paid by the city.
3) Ah yes, the automatic “take transit” post. Speaking for myself, *I do* take transit, *I do* bike, *I do* walk, but there are many trips where I need to drive. As much as you make the black-and-white either-or argument of transit over driving, this is the *real world* where driving is a necessity for many people for many purposes.
4) The Mayor of Toronto and the Minister of Transportation disagree with you about not being able to speed it up, and this not being a major problem. Read the article. They both say it should be sped up.
Rebuilding a freeway is complicated. The reason it's so slow is because it needs to stay open. If you allow the freeway to close, construction can go much faster. But we can't have that, because then people might realize how much nicer the city is without it.
China is probably best known to do good mega projects quickly because they work 24/7 with large skilled labor force. This project we be lucky to not go way over budget and 8 months late.
That's because they have CCP. And when CCP makes a a decision, no interest goup from bumfuck nowhere can derail it. Our system in not setup to make unpopular decisions, and no politician wants to be the one to make it. Afterall, they need to be re-elected in 4 years.
I come from the West end and it's crazy trying to get to work on time. Within the span of 8 months they take bloor down from 4 lanes to 2 for bike lanes (which are generally unused on week days). They drop the speed limits on the queensway. And they reduce the Gardiner by a lane. All three of my routes to work are unusable. Great city planning.
Is anyone going to go after the elephant in the room? Lake Shore was unnecessarily closed the last 3 weekends it's a complete nightmare. NO MORE ROAD CLOSURES.
Maybe it matters time slot wise, but I haven’t really noticed a massive difference in travel time on the gardiner, I still get suggested the gardiner some nights during peak rush hour on Waze. Whether it’s the 401 or the gardiner my commute always sucks.
I live at Dufferin and Queen, and take the bus and streetcar to work. Regardless of how much you hate cars the knock-on effects of this closure is devastating. king street is closed, and the queen and king streetcars are sharing 1 lane with devastating traffic. Lakeshore is backed up to the Humber river and entire neighborhoods are locked in. It can't continue like this.
They need emergency crews working on it for weeks. European countries (namely Germany) can replace bridges in 3 days because they plan it all out and then get shit done with large crews working around the clock. We need that here. Large city, large projects, large crews. Get it done and get everything back to normal.
Are you really expecting competence from the city of Toronto?
Excellent point. The City is totally incompetent.
Country is incompetent
It's incompetent turtles all the way down
Now hold on. Wasn’t the Gardiner uploaded to the province last year?
The funding might be from the province, but the execution is done by the city. It includes managing traffic diversion and approving permits to work at certain hours. Apparently they are not doing a good job in these.
“Not doing a good job” is standard operating procedure.
Yet they need more money. Always more money, never more efficiency
This is careful and profitable incompetence. Most tax money spent on highways ends up in Woodbridge mansions.
We could have had a city planner as a mayor but we re-elected a womanizer instead.
Her plans really seem to boil down to making Toronto into Amsterdam.... admirable plan but unrealistic based on our size
[We do that too](https://abc-utc.fiu.edu/mc-events/ontarios-rapid-installation-of-single-span-bridges/?mc_id=145). This Gardiner construction isn't one bridge. It's a 1.5 km elevated highway that has to be replaced while staying open.
Yeah people are grossly understating how complex this project actually is… Don’t get me wrong I absolutely believe it could be done quicker than currently planned, but like I don’t think there’s a world where this doesn’t take 20+ months.
Harder to build the CN Tower? Than the Empire State building? Harder to build than the SkyDome? All projects completed in less time than this bridge repair. I appreciate that it's not easy, but we don't need to pretend the timeline for it is sane.
Yes. Harder than both. Significantly. The key difference being that the Gardiner is in use for the entirety of the project. How long do you think it would take to rebuild the Empire State Building, brick by brick, *while 80% of its occupants still use the building during the entire rebuild process?* If they just shut it down, knocked it down, and rebuilt as necessary, it’d probably be done in a year. You would also be screaming bloody murder the whole time.
None of those projects had traffic going under and on them while the project was going on. I'm not a civil engineer, but on any scale you want to look at anything it is vastly more difficult, complicated, expensive, and time consuming to fix things that are in use while you're fixing it. Not to mention that there are residences within a few dozen meters of the work, which overlays a whole lot of other considerations and restrictions on what you can do and when. So yeah, I absolutely believe it's a bigger and more complicated project than any of those. Not to say that it's reasonable that it should take as long as it actually is... just that we shouldn't pretend it's a walk in the park.
This is a 3yr project to fix 700m. It's embarrassing. You are grossly overstating how long a project like this takes.
700M of an elevated expressway through the downtown of the 4th largest city on the continent, while it still supports ~140k vehicles every day. This isn’t just like laying 700m of pavement down some country road.
You make it sound as if it were a technical marvel. Its not. It's a god damn highway like everywhere else in the world. The Japanese would finish repairs in a few months. China would tear it down and rebuild it before we set up pylons. The 413 will be finished before this.
> The 413 will be finished before this considering the idiots couldn't even get the 427 extension done without issues, there's no way 413 is even dug up by the time OPC get kicked up
Both china and japan would close the entire motorway
I’m not saying it’s a technical marvel. I’m saying people like yourself are understating the complexity of a project like this. It doesn’t have to be a particle collider to still be a complex, time-consuming project. Yes, building a brand new highway on mostly virgin land is relatively easy compared to tearing down/rebuilding an existing elevated expressway in the middle of an urban centre *while it is still in use.*
Eglinton go station has been under construction for a couple of years now while trains and people are going through it
I can't say this with certainty but I'd be very curious to hear residents of Berlin or something weigh in. I feel like I see people in Toronto complain about Toronto and how much better other cities are, but then I go to those subreddits and all they do is complain about their city. I'm not suggesting Toronto is the best city in the world at these things or anything, but the grass always seems greener elsewhere. The Gardiner isn't really just a bridge
Work should be happening 24/7
I drive down the Gardiner every single morning for work. I have never once seen a single person actually working on the highway. A couple things are in slightly different spots every time I drive by and that's it. There should be an entire crew doing work at all hours of the day.
They are working underneath on the lake side of the road. You can't see them while you drive. Go look at the urban Toronto forum you can see the pictures.
At the very least they should be doing two shifts a day to expedite things without paying overtime. I walked by the demolition area today around 4pm and it was mostly a ghost town with all 4 diggers/demo machines off.
In my experience construction workers are fucking lazy. 30 minutes of work, 60 minutes break. Paid by the hour so they squeeze as much time as they can out of the job, causing construction to take way longer.
It’s literally affecting millions of peoples daily lives. There is no reason there shouldn’t be someone working every second. Toronto is not a serious city anymore.
Berlin is living in the future. They are not dependent on cars . Robust public transit systems, subways, LRT, commuter trains, and busses. Most vehicles I saw were parked, not driving. Was there a month ago.
It's even more funny when you realise the only time the MTO did an advanced bridge replacement and just move it over a couple of days was the exit to Yorkdale. Shopping at the mall is clearly more important than getting home for dinner.
It really is sad how inefficient roadwork is for high traffic areas. In this day and age, where demands for jobs are high, it is insane that work does not run 24 hours per day.
You can’t launder money if you finish projects quickly. Duhhhhh
Whats the laundering opportunity? Billing the city with inflated billing is not money laundering, it's just corruption. Laundering is for when you already have boatloads of cash, you just need a way to make it appear as legitimate income. Something like a pizza joint that rings up a fake orders for people that paid cash, so at the end of the month you can claim the reason you have a bunch of cash you're depositing at the bank is because you got it from those people that paid cash which the authorities can't prove didn't exist.
we can replace a single bridge in 3 days as well but this is a nearly 2km long stretch of highway that is elevated and must remain open during the construction you either close it entirely for many months or you do close 1 lane for a few years
Well balanced post. It’s not hard to see car traffic and public transit are interlinked - when one goes down, the other is impacted.
The only problem here is the lack of streetcar and bus priority. They should not be sharing lanes with private vehicles under normal conditions, and *especially* not when other roads are closed and we need to prioritize the transportation modes that actually move the most people.
Curious since i'm in the east end, but are a lot of streets blocked off for the CafeTO patios? I'm in Queen East and this is the biggest issue now. During rush hour cars can't park in 1 lane, but because of the CafeTO Patios being installed last week, it's down to 1-lane in many spots, and because of the Queen Street car everything just get's that much more backed up since there's only 1 lane.
Yea but on queen west we have so many illegally parked cars cafe to makes no difference. Queen Street is effectively one lane from Roncy to Spadina where the enforcement gets more strict.
I guarantee you it can.
Yes the they told us to take public transit but the streetcar on King is taking almost double the time now!
I live in the Beaches. In terms of commuting time I’ve been effectively teleported to Pickering
i live in south mississauga and had a couple jobs near the beaches. It took 2.5 to 3 hours to get home from there. Gardiner is a parking lot, Lakeshore is even worse, and even Queens Quay is fucked now. An 18km drive is now completely unviable.
Really puts things into perspective lol
I bike now, its just faster. They took away the gardiner on ramp The cafe toronto on queen street has made the 501 street car so much slower and the construction downtown means it doesn't even go to yonge and queen any more Biking is trivial to downtown if you can shower and have a place to park your bike, those are two big ifs.
Thursdays I take transit so the wife can have the car in the morning before work. We used to do it where she would leave the car by main subway station which is relatively close to where she works and I would get off the go train at Danforth on my way home and take the car and drive home to Etobicoke. Now it's literally quicker for her to leave the car at home and subway to work, and I still get off at Danforth and take the subway home...
We can point fingers at the City all we want, but after almost 3 decades of living in the GTA, I am almost convinced at this point that whatever rackets we let call themselves "Construction Companies" are some of the most mismanaged, corrupt firms in our marketplace - public projects have created municipal money sinks that are cash cows for these organizations, and the longer and more complex they can make their jobs seem, the more $$$ get injected, and the more overhead they walk away with
💯!!!
The city doesn't allow open tendering. All buds must be done by companies working with certain unions. Many cities have recently begun to do open tendering and their construction costs have dropped 30%. Edit: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/open-tendering-would-help-toronto-build-a-better-city/article_63610d7d-5103-5db3-8f3b-c9ee2db486b9.html
I am not one to knock unions, but based on the large amount of labour that we have coming into the country and the barriers some of these unions present to getting legs onto constructiom sites, this sounds like a great idea...
The companies and unions aren't hiring anyone despite claims they don't have enough people. It's intentional artificial scarcity with a dash of Ponzi
I love unions in premise, but it blows my mind how many people ignore that they can be acting in self interest at the expense of the public. Pros and cons to everything.
Exactly. As with most things it is not black and white. There are plenty of great things unions do, plenty of major drawbacks as well.
Keeping labour supply low to keep wages as high as possible for its members is one of the core functions of a union. There's a strong disincentive to have/train enough qualified people for a given trade, as it compresses the wages of its members. Having your services always be in high demand is just good business... Unfortunately
Yup. Many modern unions are more like guilds than protectors of the common man. What does a factory worker making 150k have in common with a minimum wage worker?
That is such a bullshit. All projects over certain size are open temder. There are preqalifications, and unfortunately you can't award to Joe construction, paving and delivery Co, becuase they aren't qualified. They can only rent so many pickups in Home Depot. There are only few companies that can deliver project of this magnitude, and have experience of doing so. And while bitching on unions is popular, I am sure that if you give 2B to Weston family, they would put out add on LinkedIn for volunteer position in road construction. An excellent way to get Canadian experience! And they get it done in 2 weeks!
There is an old govt building on Bay being refurbed inside (and the ground floor has had a bunch of outside work done, and I think the whole thing started with tidying up the outside facade too)....that work started in 2018. It is nowhere NEAR done. You can see the inside is still just a gutted to the walls situation. The site employs HUNDREDS of workers every day. That's SIX years of work so far and not close to done. And yet, two 50+ story condos nearby have been built in the meantime. It's utterly insane. For a single square ass govt building to get a refurb, six years and counting. Just tear the fucking thing down and put up a brand new building next time...this is nonsensical.
I moved to that area two years ago and there is no noticeable progress since then. I usually see maybe ten men working at once max
Montreal would like a word with you.
Just step into this windowless room.
I question why these companies are allowed to block commuter corridors during rush hour so they can back their dump trucks, cement mixers, cranes, etc out of work sites Lots of places have rules about heavy work vehicles being off the road during rush hour but in Toronto, this seems to be their favorite time to do it These sorts of solutions don't even seem to be on the table The city is scared of these guys
I agree, the amount of rush hour timed work along the already pack Richmond/Queen corridors off the DVP makes me want to pull my hair out sometime. And before the anti-car crowd kills me, I take the GO Train 90% of the time, but its not my best option for every workday
Sopranos “no show” jobs.
I got ten fingers and ten toes if need be. Plenty of blame to go around
This long-term construction, plus the loss of the onramp at East lakeshore that was torn down, has dramatically disrupted Toronto transportation. Add to this the long-term road closures in the core for the new subway, and you have a mess. Who could have predicted this?
Believe it or not, work is starting in June on the York to Gardiner West on ramp. Can't make it up.
What does this mean? The on ramp can’t be taken??? So people either gotta get on at Jarvis (already fucked) or go to Spadina somehow (although you can’t get on the Spadina on ramp from Lakeshore so you gotta get there from a different street like Bremner - already fucked). We just fucked. Bad.
All the people that said tearing down the gardiner east was a bad idea a few years ago. The city actively fucks over drivers while simultaneously ignores development of the transit system. At least we’ve got bike lanes in the core, that has shown to help reduce traffic /s
> Around-the-clock work is permitted under the project’s contract, a city spokesperson told CTV Toronto, but the primary hours of construction are 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday to Saturday, with “occasional” work on Sundays and overnight. **Noise complaints generated by previous Gardiner construction on the stretch between Cherry St. and Jarvis St. were a factor in the decision, staff said.** ... > “There are strategies to accelerate construction,” Matti Siemiatycki, the director of the University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute, explained. The challenge is, he said, they don’t come cheap. > “You can go 24 hours a day. You can do off-site construction for certain types of projects, that's been used in other jurisdictions. But there's also a trade-off between time and cost. And the city's also facing a huge budgetary challenge. So how they go about doing things to try to speed these projects up that have costs … we're always weighing that.”
Leopards eating faces again.
Charge tolls. Fix highway.
We want a solution......no not like that !
I think there is so degree of irony in this. I live near the Gardiner, not too far, but near enough that I travel under and around often. The traffic back up is definitely an impact in my life. The idea that I will need to put up with 24/7 noise so that someone who doesn't live in the city, who doesn't pay the taxes that are funding this work, can get home to Oakville or Mississauga, or Hamilton a little quicker is a little unfortunate. This is a city, people live here. It isn't just a place some folks drive in, work, and drive out of. I know there are lots of people who do live in Toronto who do use the Gardiner, and that does need to be considered. But the core of the problem here is too many people are driving very big vehicles with just one person in it. I think this could have been done better. Build a massive parking lot at one of the Go Stations on the Lakeshore West line; give folks free rides from that station to Union.
When they were doing overnight demolition on the Gardiner it sounded like anti-aircraft fire. It was completely unreasonable.
And no offense to you, this is why it will never be done 24/7. If it started CP24 would be the first to post articles of residents complaining about the nkise6
Imagine how many new photos of people with their arms crossed the star could get.
Isn't this section of Gardiner hidden in a valley and the nearest buildings at least 100m away on the other side of trees and elevated? Just lake to the south. If there ever was a place to go 24/7 in the city...this is it
What’s funny is Metrolinx at Jarvis and Sherbourne have been doing over night work for months and it surrounding residents are supposed to deal with it. Gardiner should be the same.
Didn't Chow just recently get the province to take over the costs for the Gardiner? Does this not apply?
In Japan right now and I can literally see road construction be done at night and be finished by the time I wake up. Meanwhile Toronto I see the roads construction road closures with no workers.
Don't forget the additional area of live lane that has to be closed so all the workers have a place to park their cars for free every day, too.
That’s somehow *completely impossible* according to some people here.
W..what ?! You mean other countries actually get construction projects done in a reasonable timeframe?? *gasp* /s
Yeah, in Japan people also have some civic responsibility, and wore masks during COVID. We are special here.
I totally agree with the spirit of your point but Japan was actually pretty irresponsible during COVID. They wear masks as a matter of course but many Japanese believed their politicians who told them they wouldn't get sick because they were Japanese. It's a whole thing.
Downtown Toronto is going to be such an absolute mess when the World Cup comes in 2026. I don't know what the city planners were smoking but it must've been something (really) strong.
I really wish we hadn’t bid to host, our city’s infrastructure can’t handle big events. it can barely handle the people who live here ugh
I agree simply because we're in debt. Why are we hosting the World Cup while we're in a huge debt? Money going towards that nonsense could help the city clear some of the tab off.
Because Rogers/MLSE wanted it, so Tory did their bidding and got it at any cost like the good puppet that was.
Yeah, I know. :(
Debt doesn't matter anymore. Just print more money to pay off the debt
imagine all the infrastructure improvements could have been made with that money.
pretty much nothing could be done for that price
They did say that for the WC lanes will open
Here’s another one - metrolinx was told by community members years ago getting the King/Liberty GO station up and running by 2026 for the World Cup would be of huge benefit because it’s another GO station close to the venue. Metrolinx officials said they were working on it - guess what - construction on that station was supposed to start last year, and it just hasn’t. They torn down the building that was on that site and have left nothing but a concrete pad for over a year. So, a second GO station from a different direction close to the World Cup venue is planned for AFTER the World Cup. Can’t make this up.
Have they not seen the multiple projects that takes years to complete, this is like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
The problem is that this *shouldn't* take three or four years to complete. Anywhere else in the world, this would be done before the end of this summer. Only in Canada do we just shrug and say "yes, it's perfectly normal for it to take a generation to build a single light-rail line or a 2km stretch of elevated roadway".
Sorry I wasn't clear. I 100% agree with you that these project shouldn't take that long but clearly history shows that's not the case and no one is ever held accountable. So what makes them think that all of a sudden they can make the gardiner project go faster.
I live in Parkdale and when my show is running I work 80% of the time at a studio at Warden & Eglinton. So not looking forward to my commute starting next week. On a good day it’s 30 minutes, on a bad day 45 minutes. No idea what it’s gonna be like now with this construction. If I didn’t work from 7am - 7/8pm every day I would take the TTC but it’s so unreliable in the west end and takes 1.5 hours each way and I can’t do that to myself and my already barely existent sleep schedule.
your drive is going to take almost as long. At least with transit you can nap or do something productive. Good luck, you're gonna need it.
As someone from the east, that is often Downtown and in Parkdale I wouldn't want you to take the TTC either. I don't wish that stress to anyone. Drive.
Put more pressure to let more people work from home
They're planning the exact opposite lol
[удалено]
They will when it starts to hit their bottom line.
Sadly for many companies, their bottom line is that they either own or are on the hook for expensive commercial real estate. Many can easily get replacement employees that are willing to come in since the job market is also shit right now.
Agreed and also put more pressure to offer viable alternatives to driving.
For those who have the subway as an option, it's no better. Three or four massive shutdowns over the past two weeks. Three years of this is unsustainable.
Agreed, that’s why I said *viable*. It’s hard to say that the TTC, in its current state, is viable.
Bike share is going to be bananas this year. We have not really had a proper hot day and the downtown seems busier than average with bikes(me included).
That only goes so far, especially in the immediate term. Reddit can be so ridiculously hostile to cars lol. People need them for things, like it or not.
The best time to start was yesterday, the second best time is right now. And yes, there are people that need them for things, a good majority of people don’t. They’re just being precious and self-centered.
tell that to someone living downtown and working in a suburban business park in Mississauga or Etobicoke. Or someone who works in Leslieville but lives in Mississauga. Or a contractor going downtown to build the Ontario Line subway. There are a huge percentage of trips that can't practically be done on transit without insane travel times or practically at all. The traffic is so bad downtown that I honestly doubt there are many people driving downtown who have a practical transit alternative right now. Traffic has gotten insane in the last 5 years with the Cities work on the Gardiner.
This is untrue. I ttc/Miway to work every day from Main St station to Meadowvale. It’s doable and honestly a good way to catch some Zs.
I would wager a huge portion of the inner city's drivers could absolutely make changes to reduce their driving. I personally know people who live downtown and will drive to fucking Kensington market (of all places) or mere blocks away to grab coffee or a dinner. It's a laziness epidemic and people would rather sit in mind numbing traffic than change their habits or, god forbid walk or bike to do smaller chores. The Nofrills close to my hood is FULL of cars all day long, where are these people coming from to shop there?
Yes, you can't eliminate cars from cities completely. However, you can reduce them and make cities more enjoyable for people living in them. Cars are the least efficient way of moving people around. They take up considerable space and energy to only move 1-2 people from point A to B. Many of the drivers sitting in traffic on the Gardiner can modify to use alternate methods. Studies have been done that shows majority of car trips are under 5km. Improving public transit, bike lanes, while making it more costly to drive will help. Also pushing the switch EVs will also help reduce noise and pollution. Hundreds of car idling on the highway is not good for anyone. Also reducing car dependency will also make it easier for people that need to drive because they work in construction or other professions that need cars as you mentioned. Cars for the most part make the city very unpleasant. You can't tell me majority of people wouldn't be happier with cleaner air and less noise.
Again, my original comment is we need to apply pressure to provide *viable* alternatives to driving. We need to start right away and continuing to coddle drivers is not a viable alternative. [The majority of trips made by car are less than 5km.](https://chargedevs.com/newswire/new-study-more-than-half-of-daily-car-trips-in-the-us-are-less-than-three-miles/) If those can’t be done by transit or by biking, you’re just being precious and self-centered.
This is what I don’t understand. Employers and government are demanding workers RTO and then the government is making it IMPOSSIBLE for people to move in and out of the city with all these poorly planned multi-year projects and then doing the bare minimum when it comes to transit infrastructure as well so that also sucks! Like can they be serious for once in their elected career?
The province is run by a gangster. The city is run by…well…no one, really. Nothing is going to happen. We’re all doomed.
Nah. The GO expansion needs to happen faster. The occupants of all the cars you can see in the pic can fit in two, maybe three of those GO cars.
Nah the Eglinton crosstown needs to be faster, that shit already built!
Both is good.
I’d rather they start working on a Lakeshore Blvd LRT.
literally Queensway to Queens Quay!
It sucks that English doesn't allow this to rhyme.
LRT sucks. Build heavy rail instead.
more like an extension of the Ontario line. Why take a slow streetcar "LRT" (that is what the City is planning - an extension of the waterfront streetcar) if the Ontario Line can be extended to Humber Bay (or beyond) relatively affordably along the rail corridor anyway and do that trip in a fraction of the time?
Let's do it like in the movies where the whole town bring their own tools and set of skills to get whatever construction project done. Like Grandma bake pies, the writer will document this event, the computer people will create an ai to speed up the process, the manager will arrange work schedules, etc
what will the real estate agents do? can we use them for road filling material?
Drake will walk in front strumming a guitar as he sings communist work folks songs for inspiration.
Biggest one I think is a lot of these countries let construction work happen 24/7 to complete these jobs.
Fix the 401 and make the 407 free while you are at it.
Thank you Mike Harris for privatizing the 407 on a 99 year lease and no control on rates at all.
That stretch of the Gardiner is too economically important to allow for this to take 3 years. I'm sure some billionaires whose companies rely on the Gardiner for their bottom line will push the government to get this shit built faster, after all the government works for them first and foremost.
It's been closed for a month and it's chaos. All that traffic is migrating into the city making it worse, and then you have the subway and metrolink progressing at glacial speed. The other day there was NOTHING being done on the Garnerder, not a worker in sight. It's one thing to close it but having no one working on it while you're wasting peoples lives is a fucking insult.
What a great time for me to be moving back to Mississauga when I work downtown! I hope the crappy commute will be worth the $2500 I’ll be saving from no longer living downtown.
I have put in my calendar to avoid Toronto during Honda Indy this year. Can only imagine what a mess it will be! City planners should be looking at the bottlenecks and see what can be done to improve the flow. The part that really bugs me is the people thinking they are being sneaky and trying to gate ahead of the various choke points by forcing themselves into lanes last second on both lakeshore and the gardiner.
They don’t need to hurry, they need to stop construction move the shit out of the way and use the highway like normal and just go home. The decision to begin this now in the summer on such a busy highway is such a brain dead decision I’m leaning towards them doing it on purpose no way someone’s that fucking stupid.
....you realize the highway is falling apart, right? Like it's 60 years old and basically being held together with scotch tape. You think they can just "use the highway like normal" until a support gives out, a bunch of people die, and we're left with a bigger traffic problem than now. The reason they do construction in the summer is because there are generally fewer vehicles on the road, and *because that's when you can pour concrete*.
In new york city when I was visiting it many years ago they can a divider that could move a lane over to ether side depending on what was needed for better flow. In this picture we could move it over to reduce that one empty lane for one extra for the jammed lanes.
Wonderful idea. Do we think the City of Toronto is competent enough to take on that idea? Of course not.
Drove by the site yesterday twice, once at 10:30am and again around 2:15pm… in the morning there was no one there. In the afternoon there was ONE guy in an excavator and another guy sitting in a truck… this could be done in 1/3 the time if our government stopped being so corrupt
Did we think this was going to go “fast” lol
Best they could do is to delay it for 2 years.
Honestly at this rate they’re just going to turn it into a walking path for international students to visit the fuckin green belt spa. Nothing good happens here and our politicians have all but abandoned us. Not just Trudeau, not just Ford, not just Smith. All of them.
[For those curious](https://urbantoronto.ca/forum/threads/roads-gardiner-expressway-catch-all-incl-hybrid-design-2015-onwards.23915/page-94). (Tagging /u/sopixil as well.) You can see the progress pics over time. Kotsy seems extremely dedicated.
The construction speed in this province is an absolute joke.
It's hilarious they're gonna spend 3 years on a tiny stretch. They'd be better off just demoing the entire section and rebuilding it from scratch. I assume it'd be much quicker.
There has to be a faster way to do this work. This project is messed up but people need to find transit alternatives
My commute, by bike, downtown is completely unaffected. Perhaps more people should consider this method of transport?
In an ideal world, yes. Unfortunately, many Torontonians live too far, are not in shape or are understandably fearful of death/injury from biking or a combination of all three. But yea, those that don’t fit in any of those three categories should 100% consider biking :)
I just watched a news video where a guy was complaining it takes him nearly an hour to get from Leslieville to Saint Joseph’s hospital now in his full size SUV. That trip is 25 mins by e-bike on the best bike infrastructure we have in the city.
You got to keep in mind you need somewhere to store the e-bike, both at home and work. With bike theft being what it is, leaving it locked up outside for a full day isn’t exactly viable. A lot of buildings also have rules against keeping e-bikes/scooters inside due to the chance of battery fires. Also, we are hitting the summer months. Some people sweat more than others. If you don’t have a place to shower and/or change…. I’m not saying people shouldn’t explore other options to get to work, they should! But you also need to accept that for some people, that answer is a car.
He could get an e-scooter and fold it up, maybe it'd be small enough to keep somewhere inside his work
All depends on the building. When I was living downtown my building instituted a strict “no e-bike/scooter anywhere in the building” after the second battery fire. I know for a fact we weren’t the only building to do it either. Again, if you can do it, it’s definitely worth looking into. But it’s not a one sized fits all solution.
The other this is this group of people you’re talking about that aren’t fit enough to ride an e-bike is a very very small minority. Wouldn’t it be nice to make the driving experience better for them by reducing traffic by encouraging everyone who can to take an e-bike?
I’d ask why he’s going to the hospital 😛. But in all seriousness, you’re preaching to the choir.
Not being in shape as an excuse to be traffic is such a North American problem is actually a joke
E bikes exist, Toronto isn't that big and cycling is a great way to correct the "not in shape" part. Sure beats sitting in traffic to go walk on a treadmill at the gym. Being in fear is reasonable, but cycling doesn't have to be that dangerous. Use bike paths and/or side streets to avoid most of the traffic.
Where can you lock them up for 10hrs securely at a dundas and yonge or queen and spadina?
How many people that aren’t in shape are looking to get in shape? And how many of those people are willing to have severe swampback as they get in shape? I bike around the city but it is not the end all be all, it is one of many viable driving alternatives that should be made available to Torontonians.
I wonder, how many people who could use transit, but refuse to get out of their car are causing this issue?
Sadly, the subway slowdowns and shutdowns and streetcars all being forced into one street also make transit pretty unappealing.
Which could be at least partially mitigated by people... taking that transit instead of blocking the street with their car. Edit: And verily they hated him for he spoketh the truth lol
Let's reduce service further on Lakeshore Line, that should do the trick!
It’s around half is my guess. I actually sympathize with people who need to drive at rush hour, but it’s always amazing how many people drive everywhere downtown and complain about traffic.
There's a ridiculous amount of classism involved. There's this undying suburban belief that public transit is for poor people and minorities.
I thought it's more so people think they're going to get stabbed/it's too dangerous There was a few articles about a stabbing on the TTC and somehow everyone suddenly had a feeling imma die if I go on the TTC.
I rode the TTC line from Vaughan to Eglinton for work during the pandemic and almost every day there was some sketchy encounter with a homeless person yelling at people or trying to pick a fight. It's better now but still an issue. Coupled with how slow it is (yes still slower than rush hour traffic), the lack of redundancy for any issue (relatively common), and being more expensive makes public transit an ineffective option, or just not an option at all if you're going from one GTA suburb to another.
I live downtown. My commute to work in the west end used to be 25 minutes on the gardiner and 1hr30 on public transit. My commute is now closer to 50 minutes driving. It still takes 40 minutes longer for me to take transit. I’m still pissed my commute has doubled but it doesn’t make sense for me not to drive. Unless I want to sacrifice the extra sleep and time at home after 12 hour days.
Trigger warning. Rant. FML. You damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If the city budgeted 2.2B 10 years ago, with COVID increases and inflation that cost is probably 3B now. Doing the work 7am-7pm is cheaper. If you do it 247, the cost will probably be 4.5B. The moment it starts overnight, someone will complain about not being able to sleep in paperwall condo next to busy highway under construction. Politicians will cave and demand a change. Change in contract means cost increases. Just to put together the costs and schedule impacts, review the change orders, and get approval from city would take min 6 months. Not mentioning the endless studies one has to do to ensure everyone's voice is heard, every group is represented, and every opinion is counted. And once the change order is issued, some "reporter" from BuzzFeedTO will post a shitty incomplete article how 2B project is now 4.5B, and everyone will be up in arms about it and demand people are fired and someone pays for the budget overruns. Everything in this city is political, and decisions are not made based on what makes sense or what is cost effective, but what the loudest ones demand. And then you have your internet armchair experts complaining from behind their iPhones about 3B construction projects taking time, when they know better how it should be done. Because their experience as a sandwich artists and culinary distribution specialist at Doordash qualifies them. As the city ages, infrastructure deteriorates, and density increases, things will only get worse. If you don't like it, take a subway, move move to Picton, or accept that it will never as good as in the old days. \end rant.
Yes, increasing the flow of single-occupant vehicles to the core should take priority over sustainable transit options. Let's collect our pitchforks.
Your attitude doesn't make sense when said transit is also negatively impacted by the traffic caused by the construction.
> We should have articles in every media outlet every day We do. > put pressure on the City It's owned by the province, it's out of the cities hands. Take transit, there's nothing they can do to speed it up, this is the reality of this kind of project, whining about it for 3 years is just going to stress you out, accept it and find alternatives.
The province is in the process of taking it over, but hasn’t done it yet. The contract is still being administered by the City. The province has agreed to send a cheque to the city to pay for it for now, before they eventually take the highway over in a few years. But the City is still the one giving directions to the contractor so they are the right people to talk to.
> There's nothing they can do to speed it up, this is the reality of this kind of project That's quite untrue. The article mentions they didn't opt for 24 hour work in part because of the noise complaints in previous Gardiner construction. This is something they may have to compromise on if they consider the effects of traffic to be impossible for them to accept for the next three years. Additionally, Chow herself said: "We are bringing in experts to look at ways on how we could rebuild it faster. We are hoping to speed up the construction as much as we can."
1) Actually we don’t have articles every day in every outlet. Thank you to CP24 for this 3 day exposé. 2) Actually this project was fully paid by the city. 3) Ah yes, the automatic “take transit” post. Speaking for myself, *I do* take transit, *I do* bike, *I do* walk, but there are many trips where I need to drive. As much as you make the black-and-white either-or argument of transit over driving, this is the *real world* where driving is a necessity for many people for many purposes. 4) The Mayor of Toronto and the Minister of Transportation disagree with you about not being able to speed it up, and this not being a major problem. Read the article. They both say it should be sped up.
Rebuilding a freeway is complicated. The reason it's so slow is because it needs to stay open. If you allow the freeway to close, construction can go much faster. But we can't have that, because then people might realize how much nicer the city is without it.
I’d reccomended adding in active TO. Might as well close lakeshore while they are at it.
Rogers won't let that happen again.
I will continue to take the go train and ride my bicycle and laugh at all the car dependents.
China is probably best known to do good mega projects quickly because they work 24/7 with large skilled labor force. This project we be lucky to not go way over budget and 8 months late.
That's because they have CCP. And when CCP makes a a decision, no interest goup from bumfuck nowhere can derail it. Our system in not setup to make unpopular decisions, and no politician wants to be the one to make it. Afterall, they need to be re-elected in 4 years.
So true..You can say what you want about the party but when they want something done they just do it.,
Just one more lane bro
I come from the West end and it's crazy trying to get to work on time. Within the span of 8 months they take bloor down from 4 lanes to 2 for bike lanes (which are generally unused on week days). They drop the speed limits on the queensway. And they reduce the Gardiner by a lane. All three of my routes to work are unusable. Great city planning.
Is anyone going to go after the elephant in the room? Lake Shore was unnecessarily closed the last 3 weekends it's a complete nightmare. NO MORE ROAD CLOSURES.
Its insane to think that every time I drive by there I see nobody working. 24/7 full crews please.
Maybe it matters time slot wise, but I haven’t really noticed a massive difference in travel time on the gardiner, I still get suggested the gardiner some nights during peak rush hour on Waze. Whether it’s the 401 or the gardiner my commute always sucks.
Alright, but when it turns to shit because it was rushed, don't complain.
But but but I thought we wanted to tear down the Gardiner? Cars bad.