As @FinsToTheLeft notes, funding throughout the Gardiner’s history has been inconsistent, and maintenance costs money. But the additional challenge is Toronto’s climate, which ranges from icy cold winters to blazingly hot summers. Contraction and expansion are going to take their toll on an elevated roadway. Plus, in winter, salt gets dumped on the roadway (not just the Gardiner; all major Toronto roads get salted), which makes driving on the road safer at the time, but over decades, that salt also takes its toll on the road surface, the expansion joints, and the concrete that keeps the roadway up.
Under these circumstances, I’d suggest that the cost of maintaining the Gardiner, no matter who pays for it, is going to get to the point where it’s going to cost more and more. As I said, parts of it (at its eastern end) have already been torn down as too expensive to maintain given their use.
We built an elevated roadway over the existing 401, and then build an end-to-end Giant Cylinder over the whole mess to protect the roadways from the weather.
Failing that, I’ll bring up my Dome Over the City plan again.
To nitpick, Toronto does not, and did not, have six boroughs. Only Scarborough styled itself a borough at any point and they stopped that in 1983. Toronto is a merger of six cities, and none of them exist in any way anymore.
As to the tunnel, it’s a preposterous and impossible idea.
Banning trucks would cost billions upon billions of dollars in lost commerce and cause massive job losses and economic dislocation.
When Ford first started talking about this, I assumed it was to deflect against other things. But when he talked about how they could dig under the English Channel, it made me think he was more serious. That doesn’t make it a good idea - opening up the 407 is much easier.
But if tunnel technology was somehow perfected over the next hundred years and it could be done much more cheaply and safely - is it still a terrible idea?
What kind of technology are you envisioning that could dig a tunnel wide enough to accommodate, say, 12 lanes of traffic and at least 40 km long, with many entrances and exits all along the way, and do it cheaply, including removal and disposal of all the earth and the necessary supporting concrete infrastructure? Or, as the saying goes, if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a streetcar. “If” is doing some heavy lifting here.
This is insane. The only practical solutions are to reclaim the 407, improve public transit, and reroute as much freight as possible from big trucks clogging the 401 to the railroads.
Every one of those is a daunting proposition, but at least not insane. Selling the 407 was a very, very bad idea that will be very hard to undo. It’s such a big moneymaker for investors that guess who one of the part owners is? The Canada Pension Plan, known for astute and very profitable management of its assets!
Nope. As a kid who grew up in North York, it was a Borough. It became a city during Mel Lastman’s reign in 1979. The others were also boroughs at one point with East York holding out to the bitter end.
Yeah, that’s my point. I know that anything involving infrastructure is expensive. But compared to pretty much any other idea, a tunnel is even more expensive.
Agree with @FinsToTheLeft . There was the City of Toronto (the inverted T on maps), and the boroughs of Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke, East York, and damned if I can recall the other. At any rate, they all started calling themselves cities at some point in the 1980s. Cities or boroughs; it didn’t really matter, as they were all members of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto. In 1997, cities or boroughs really didn’t really matter, as they were now all just Toronto.
For what it’s worth, and note that this is my first ever use of Google AI Overview as a source, I submit the following:
“Before the 1998 amalgamation, the “boroughs” of Toronto were the six lower-tier municipalities of Toronto, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, East York, and York. These were governed by the upper-tier Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto”
I know we are drifting from the topic at hand, which henceforth I will refer to as “The Big Doug”.
Toronto was originally more than 25 towns and villages with York at the centre. York eventually became Toronto and the 25+ municipalities amalgamated over time. When Metropolitan Toronto was formed in 1953, there were 12 towns, villages, and townships plus the City of Toronto. Further amalgamations took place in 1967 which left the City and 5 Boroughs. The Boroughs, with the exception of East York, all reincorporated as cities in the 1970s and 1980s. Toronto was never really considered to be or legally a Borough.
Except it most likely won’t. That’s the sort of fear mongering traffic planners and automobile industry shills like to spout, but “carmageddon” basically never happens because people plan for it and adjust. If those trucks were just Thanos-snapped out of existence then sure, but they’ll find alternate routes, alternate modes, and alternate schedules that work.
Also the highway already caused and is still causing billions upon billions of dollars in lost commerce, job losses, and economic dislocation, just for a different subset of people and businesses. There’s no reason to presume the current status quo is the better one. Has there been a highway teardown project or congestion pricing scheme that didn’t result in less traffic, better air quality, and improved mobility?
100 km of 8-lane highway built deep under a city’s major roads would make the Big Dig look cheap and quick. I think a few million dollars per foot might be a sensible place to start the cost estimate.
You can always find alternatives; the alternatives are often vastly less efficient.
I work in industry in this region; the dependence on trucks is huge. Sure, things would adjust. They always do; the adjustment often hurts a lot and results in a less desirable state.
The Big Dig was child’s play compared to the idiotic 401 Tunnel idea.
The Big Dig was something like five or six miles of tunnels and cost, in 2025 Canadian dollars, around $20-25 billion. Ford is proposing a tunnel ten times longer to be buried underneath one of the busiest and most important freeways in the history of roads. It would cost $200 billion if it cost a dime, and quite frankly I think I’m being extremely conservative. That’s basically the entire provincial budget for a year. Not the provincial budget for transportation for a year - EVERYTHING.
This is a province that after 14 years still hasn’t gotten the Eglinton LRT line working, a project that is fifty times less difficult.
Moving a significant portion of long-haul freight transport from trucks to other modes, in particular to railroads, would have a tremendous benefit in easing congestion on the 401. That, and turning the 407 back into a freeway vs a toll road would go a very long way to solving the congestion problem.
It also occurs to me that it would have a secondary benefit. One of the big reasons that expressways have to undergo so much repair and repaving – which itself is a major cause of traffic backups – is because of constant pounding by big heavy trucks. Reducing heavy truck traffic would significantly extend the lifetime of our major highways. Trucks are best utilized for local transport, not for long-haul.
I went digging for data on just how much GTA truck traffic is long-haul transiting through vs local/regional. The best source I’ve found was this paper from 2009:
It looks like only 16% of truck traffic in the GTA is long-haul route transiting through. The rest either originates in the GTA, or the GTA is the destination. It still doesn’t break down what % of that traffic is purely intra-regional. IMO that 16% is probably better suited for rail transport, at least.
I can understand that GO pretty much has to own the track. But VIA (and its former incarnation, CNR passenger service) have been sharing track with freight trains across the country ever since the first 19th century railways!
16% sounds low, but saying that the rest either originates or is destined for the GTA may be misleading. How much of it, for instance, is auto parts destined for gigantic assembly plants in Oshawa or Oakville, or finished vehicles originating from those plants? All of which can be more efficiently transported by rail.