Bury the Gardiner AND Lakeshore Boulevard
“Our commitment to our Waterfront starts here.”
The ONLY way to reconnect our city to the waterfront is to take down the Gardiner Expressway and Lakeshore Boulevard.
There has been much debate over this issue and many different proposals have come forth with different degrees of creativity and practicality. However, there comes a time when a city has to collectively bite the bullet and correct its past mistakes. Our city does contain many big mistakes when it comes to infrastructure design and construction. The Gardiner and Lakeshore together constitute the largest unfortunate design solution. In defense of the well meaning engineers of the time, Toronto Harbour was not what people want it to be today. As such we have to make it into what we want, and that is a vibrant, accessible and well designed playground on the water.
Currently, we have two barriers (many people think of the Gardiner only, but lakeshore is equally problematic). These two barriers have to be removed once and for all. This area, one of the most critical stretches of land in Toronto, needs to be woven back into the overall city fabric.
The counter argument is that it costs too much but my proposal calls for part of the cost to come from the land value on which the Gardiner sits. The Gardiner and Lakeshore run through some of Toronto most valuable real estate. What I propose to do is to build a 12 lane tunnel below grade, consisting of collector and express lanes. At street level, a new low speed two lane road (matching in character and scale King Street or Queen Street ) with a CO2 Free path will take Lakeshore Blvd’s place.
In addition, new residential, commercial, institutional, cultural and sports buildings can take the residual space. This new street will be very effective in allowing the north/south streets such as Yonge Street or Bay Street to move its cars and pedestrians south towards the lake in a much friendlier manner. The collective Right of Way of the Gardiner and Lakeshore is 60 m on average. The new road takes 20 m and the rest is for development.
The total project will be 10 kilometres, 6 km will be tunneled, and 4 km will be decked over. By conservative estimates, the land value of this 10 km stretch is $3 Billion in today’s dollar. The Sale and development fees of this land should offset a sizable piece of this project’s cost. Public funds will cover only part of the cost since a good chunk of it can come from sale of the lands. In fact there are also other parcels of land adjacent to the Gardiner that are not part of the right of way but that are too small and too close to the Gardiner to be developable. By our measure, we can also give new life to these pieces.
The attached sketches show how some of the more difficult parts of the Gardiner (where the buildings have turned their back onto the Gardiner and built parking structures right up to it) can be easily woven into the fabric of the city. The Gardiner goes through many different sections of the city, so the density allocated to each section will be appropriate to the area in which it is. This density can vary from 5 or 6 times up to much higher numbers around the downtown core. Many people argue that the Gardiner can be removed and the Lakeshore can remain. The problem with that solution is what we see on the East side of the Gardiner at Leslie Street, where this has already been done. The right of way is so vast that what remains resembles a wasteland populated by high speed cars. The adventure involved in crossing this new wide street is no less dangerous or cumbersome than the current state of affairs. We need to take both the Gardiner and Lakeshore below grade and allow our city to reconnect to its waterfront. We can make that happen.
