This week, the provincial government and the city of Toronto announced that Ontario will provide $73 million to accelerate the ongoing work on the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated freeway that runs through downtown Toronto close to the shores of Lake Ontario. The expressway has been a focus of enormous controversy. It’s in poor physical condition, and the city in recent years had faced a choice between demolishing it and rebuilding it. It chose the latter, though along a new route intended to free up more land for development.
I dare not say much more about all that. I’ve been in the Toronto media long enough to feel an almost instinctive dread when touching upon certain topics, and What to Do With the Gardiner is one of them. I don’t need that bad energy in my life. So suffice it to say that, since the city chose to keep it, it now needs to repair the sections that will remain operational even after the eventual route realignment. Work on that project began a few months ago, and the resulting lane restrictions have been a nightmare for commuters. I have family that’s best accessed along the Gardiner, and, yikes, dear readers — it’s bad. And the knock-on effect of that traffic nightmare is flowing out through that whole area of the city, as commuters seek alternate routes.
The provincial money came with a string attached. As a condition of accepting the bucks, Toronto had to agree to allow the roadwork to continue 24/7, which in turn had to be coordinated with the private-sector contractor doing the actual work. That’s all arranged, and the plan is to take the extra money and the extended working hours and finish the entire project a full year ahead of schedule. Instead of a three-year project, we could — if we are lucky — get this done in two years, in time for Toronto’s World Cup games.
My response to all this: Why were we ever not doing this?
Seriously. Anyone who knows anything about Toronto knows these two things: traffic is always a disaster in this town, and taking lanes of the Gardiner out of service is the kind of thing you’d do if your purpose in life were to make Toronto’s commuters suffer. It is bonkers that the default starting position from Toronto officials, from the very outset of this project, wasn’t that literally everything that could be done to get this finished as soon as possible must absolutely be done.
I don’t want to be churlish about this and rain on parades. A year has been cut off the timeline! Yay! Hurrah. But, like, also, there was a full year that could be cut from this timeline, and we didn’t originally plan on cutting it? What is wrong with us?
This is not a new concern. Just about six weeks ago, I wrote about a roadwork project in my neighbourhood that seemed design to cause maximum disruption for as long as possible. That was just a local hassle; disruptions to the Gardiner cause city-wide problems. But it reflected the same default acceptance of mediocrity and lack of urgency. If we can fix our problems by spending more money, we should spend more money to fix those problems.
And there are two problems here. The first is Toronto’s abysmal traffic situation; a recent poll by Ipsos, for the Toronto Region Board of Trade, found that half of Torontonians are so fed up with traffic that they are considering leaving to avoid it. More than 60 per cent said they were reluctant to travel for work. That’s a pretty grim signal. But there is also the issue I’ve been writing about so much of late: our publicly owned infrastructure is in terrible shape all across the country. This is resulting in sudden, sometimes catastrophic failures (Calgary’s recent water-main debacle being the best, most recent example). Speeding up our efforts to fix critical bits of infrastructure is essential for limiting the disruption of repair efforts. Doing so also fixes the damn infrastructure as soon as is possible, and that counts, too.
Money is always an issue. I get it. I’m a realist. But no one denies that we need to get these projects done — and as fast as possible. But people seem to acknowledge that only in theory. In practice, where’s the urgency? It would be nice to see some more efforts like this week’s deal with the province. If we can fix this city and province faster by deciding to spend the money to do so, let’s spend the money and fix the problems. Isn’t that the point?
Donate