When Premier Doug Ford announced on September 25 his vision for a tunnel running underneath Highway 401 through the GTA, more than a few eyebrows were raised. Yet he’s far from the first to suggest that Toronto’s transit future should in part take the low road: many builders and politicians have envisioned constructing some form of underground route to alleviate the city’s traffic headaches. Most such plans have involved replacing the elevated section of the Gardiner Expressway.
“Going underground is not for the timid,” observed a 2014 Globe and Mail article examining whether Canadian cities should bury their traffic problems. “The costs and engineering challenges are immense. But so too are the potential benefits: a weather-free conduit with no visual distractions; the city above left unscarred by intrusive at-grade or elevated expressways.”
Among the first serious proposals to shift Toronto traffic underground was 1963’s Plan forDowntown Toronto. Published by the city’s planning board, it examined ways to separate pedestrian and vehicular traffic. One idea was to construct a series of tunnels along major routes to carry traffic through the core. “Leaving the present street surface to the pedestrian and putting vehicular traffic below might be the more desirable, as people should be able to walk into the ground floor of all buildings, particularly shops and offices, and be able to reach public transit easily,” the report observed. While the authors didn’t expect such a system to be in place before 1980, they recommended that any new buildings be constructed to fit multiple below-ground levels for vehicles and public transit. The vision was to create a more attractive, interesting streetscape that could provide a model for similar rethinking elsewhere.
A year after the study was published, Toronto Star writer Val Sears imagined what a stroll down Bay Street would be like if the plan were implemented: “There are no cars or trucks or buses. They are below us in fast-moving vehicle tunnels as wide as the street. We walk amid fountains and trees from perhaps a park where the old City Hall used to be, between tall buildings to a financial plaza at King and Bay.” Escalators would connect to the underground roadways, while parking lots would be equipped with loading and unloading bays.
But downtown never got its traffic-tunnel network. Instead, it would be pedestrians who moved below the surface, thanks to the expansion of the PATH network.
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By the 1980s, as its elevated section aged, the Gardiner Expressway and its future became the focus of those with underground-traffic dreams. During her 1985 mayoral campaign, Councillor Anne Johnston proposed burying the expressway. The plan would be funded by levying a surcharge on waterfront development and convincing all higher levels of government to pitch in. Johnston abandoned her pledge during the campaign, indicating she would wait until consultants had provided their opinions about the Gardiner’s future. In the end, though, Art Eggleton rolled to his third straight victory.
A few years later, developer Bill Teron, who had previously assembled the land that became Harbourfront, pitched a solution. “Right now we don’t have a city on the waterfront,” he told the Globe and Mail. “We have a city on the Gardiner.” He envisioned a 4.5-kilometre buried expressway along the waterfront from Bathurst Street to the Don River that would be covered with parkland and separated from the lake with a reinforced wall. When he pitched his plan to local politicians in 1989, Teron estimated that the cost would be $1 billion but indicated that it could be waived in exchange for waterfront land owned by the city, Metro, and the province.
Waterfront, looking east from Yonge Street, ca. 1978. (City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 1465, File 142, Item 45)
Around the same time, architect Colin Bent and the FGOTW (Four Guys Off the Wall) Partnership developed an offbeat plan of their own. They proposed an eight-kilometre-long tunnel built under parkland-covered fill along the Lake Ontario shoreline. Constructed and financed by a private corporation, it would then be turned over to Metro Toronto. Metro officials rejected the proposal over concerns such as access to marinas and existing businesses.
As the 1990s went on, local officials watched the progress of Boston’s Big Dig, which buried the Central Artery portion of Interstate 93 through that city’s core. On the one hand, it showed the promise of tearing down an elevated highway and reintegrating the areas it divided. On the other, the spiralling cost of the project left traditionally penny-pinching politicians nervous, as did the potential chaos of removing the Gardiner from service for several years. Tolls were frequently proposed as a funding solution.
With encouragement from the Waterfront Regeneration Trust, headed by former mayor David Crombie, Canadian Highways International — which was building Highway 407 at the time — looked into the possibility of an underground tollway, hiring IBI Group for the redesign. By October 1998, the idea was supported by Mayor Mel Lastman, who called the Gardiner “yesterday’s mistake.” At a news conference, Lastman said that the project would mean “we could lift the concrete curtain between our city and our harbour and lake front. We could see the water again.”
Ramp demolition at Leslie Street, viewed from south side, during the demolition of the eastern stump of the Gardiner on January 20, 2001. (Peter MacCallum/City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 219, Series 572, Subseries 2, Item 11)
By early 1999, CHI officials envisioned tolls in the $1.50-$2 range per trip and assured the city it would not be at financial risk, because it would be privately financed. City officials were critical, concerned that there would be at least six years of traffic disruptions and that tolls could push around 30,000 vehicles per day off the expressway onto city streets. Councillor Howard Moscoe called it “a truly pie-in-the-ground proposal” and a scam. Lastman lost his enthusiasm for the project and declared it dead.
It wasn’t long before another tunnel proposal emerged. The Toronto Revitalization Task Force, chaired by Robert Fung, recommended the removal of the expressway when its report on waterfront redevelopment was released in early 2000. Its preference was to bury a 1.5-kilometre stretch between Strachan and Spadina Avenues, with a surface road continuing eastward. The plan would be coordinated with a western extension of Front Street and improvements to the Don Valley Parkway/Richmond Street interchange. The task force believed the cost overruns and other problems with the Big Dig made it critical that action be taken before further development left no room for a substitute road. As well, the plan was seen as a way of freeing Fort York from its entrapment by the expressway.
Gardiner Expressway looking west from Garrison Common on September 17, 2010. (Jose San Juan/City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 219, Series 2311, File 3084, Item 167)
It was, however, criticized for its network of replacement routes, and there were concerns that tolls or increased parking rates would be used to finance the project, whose cost was pegged at $1.2 billion. Go Transit opposed it on the grounds that it would take away money needed for other infrastructure projects and that Go would need to spend more than $500 million to accommodate traffic congestion during the construction period.
In late 2001, city planners devised an alternative scheme as part of their Making Waves plan. In this version, estimated to cost $1.8 billion, the tunnel was much longer, going from Strachan Avenue to the Don River. The new road would be constructed using a “cut and cover” method that would reduce the combined capacity of the Gardiner and Lake Shore Boulevard from 12 lanes to three during the construction period. The Fung plan had faced criticism because it didn’t take into consideration drivers whose trips took them beyond downtown and neglected to factor in the role of the connection between the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway. City planners felt that better aesthetics and fewer lanes would be possible for Lake Shore Boulevard with a longer tunnel. Unlike the Fung plan, though, this one would not ensure that replacement roads were available before the elevated section was torn down. City council discussed Making Waves before placing it on the backburner as the 2003 municipal election loomed.
The next attention-grabbing tunnel proposal was connected to a project long considered dead. During the 2010 mayoral campaign, Rocco Rossi suggested constructing an eight-kilometre-long toll tunnel connecting Allen Road and the Gardiner, a proposal that effectively revived the Spadina Expressway, which had been killed by the province in 1971. Rossi compared his vision to the Chunnel. Engineers foresaw many challenges, especially regarding ventilation. Some experts said it would only succeed in moving gridlock farther south, particularly if no other infrastructure were built near the Gardiner. “There are some ways we can improve our roads, but the revival of the Spadina Expressway, even underground, would be a foolish waste of incredible amounts of money and is not by any means the most urgent transportation need in Toronto,” Jim Mars, professor emeritus at Ryerson University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, told the National Post.
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Rossi’s rivals mocked it: George Smitherman called it an April Fools’ joke, while Rob Ford’s campaign team wondered how it would be paid for. Rossi’s campaign manager, Bernie Morton, shot back at critics. “What the political left wants to do in the city is make it so difficult for people to get around,” he grumbled to the Toronto Star. “They think the best approach is to force people out of the car, make it so terrible they are going to have no option but to get out of the car.”
The tunnel didn’t help Rossi. With his polling never rising above single digits, he dropped out of the race.
When a June 2011 Toronto Board of Trade report suggested that tolls should be imposed on city roads to pay for infrastructure improvements, Doug Ford, then a city councillor, suggested that “we shouldn’t force tolls on anyone.” But he had no issue with tolls on privately built and operated roads. He mused about turning the Gardiner into a multi-level piece of underground infrastructure, with free and toll levels, along with space for trains. “If we have a firm anywhere in the world that wants to come and tunnel underneath the Gardiner all the way downtown, God bless them,” Ford declared. “Would I pay $5 to get downtown quicker and not knock off 14 bicycle riders on the way down Queen Street? I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
In late 2012, Ford again raised the idea of partnering with the private sector to build a toll tunnel, suggesting that the rubble from the elevated section could be used to create more waterfront parkland. “Go and find out who wants to build a tunnel in Toronto,” he told his fellow councillors. “Maybe it’s probable, maybe it’s not … see what happens. It doesn’t hurt. But at least we meet halfway.” Meanwhile, in an interview with Globe and Mail around this time, Fung said that, with all the development that had grown around the Gardiner since his report had been released, the only option for replacing it was a tunnel.
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As recently as 2015, a consortium proposed a plan to city council that would have seen a tunnel run for 6.5 kilometres between Cherry Street and Jameson Avenue at a cost of $4 billion, with another $1 billion for tunnelling part of Front Street. City staff rejected the idea, indicating it would take more than a decade to conduct environmental assessments and get the necessary permits from the city and province. Experts believed that any spiralling costs would be political suicide. City council’s executive committee indicated that they preferred to stay with an approved rehabilitation project.
Whether the Highway 401 tunnel proposal becomes reality or not, it’s all but certain that, at some point in the future, some developer, politician, or planner will devise yet another underground solution to the city’s traffic issues. Given current circumstances and political animosities, it’s worth considering what Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee observed in 2012 about determining the fate of the Gardiner Expressway: “It is impossible, in such a poisoned atmosphere, to make a rational decision.”
Sources: Our Toronto Waterfront: Gateway to the New Canada (Toronto: Toronto Revitalization Task Force, 2000); Plan for Downtown Toronto (Toronto: City of Toronto Planning Board, 1963); the October 3, 1998, August 2, 2000, January 10, 2003, September 14, 2010, June 29, 2011, October 20, 2012, December 13, 2012, and September 25, 2014, editions of the Globe and Mail; the February 9, 1999, September 14, 2010, and December 5, 2012, editions of the National Post; and the November 2, 1964, October 19, 1985, November 7, 1985, September 16, 1989, February 9, 1990. July 21, 1996, October 25, 2001, September 14, 2010, December 15, 2012, and September 30, 2015, editions of the Toronto Star; and the November 1988 edition of Toronto.
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