Sasha on the Street

Toronto doesn’t have a true ring road instead Toronto is surrounded by a ‘box’ road made up of Highway 427, Highway 401, The Gardiner Expressway (Gardiner) and The Don Valley Parkway (DVP).

I was inspired yesterday by a tweet by ReNew Canada to think about this issue again. As quoted from the Future of the Gardiner East “Waterfront Toronto and the City of Toronto have started a conversation considering the removal, replacement or improvement of the Gardiner Expressway from Jarvis Street to just east of the Don Valley Parkway.”

It would only add a small amount of time
I remember hearing back in the fall that tearing down this section would only add 5 minutes to a commuters drive. When? At 5am when there is hardly anybody on the road.

These four routes represent a huge part of Toronto’s transportation infrastructure. Any change to make it more inefficient will further handicap an already ailing transportation network. At a time when Transit City is still in the distant future and public transportation is inefficient we need to preserve and expand what infrastructure we have, not remove it.

It would be great if more people took the train, bus or subway to work. But for most it is still not cost or time efficient to do this. If in the future we have a more robust public transit system than revisiting the demolition of the Gardiner may be feasible.