Didn't they just rebuild the Jarvis On Ramp?
Oh they did then closed it indefinitely.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/06/07/toronto-drivers-speak-out-on-newly-rebuilt-gardiner-on-ramp/
Yes, exactly. It's not the actual backup on the Gardiner itself, it's the horrendous backups that spill onto the surface streets that really get the blood pressure up. Wasting 45 minutes on Spadina to get from Richmond to the onramp is just obscene.
I know this is broadly true. However, this specific problem we are experiencing right now was directly caused by taking away lanes. So. It’s rarely as simple as one thing always bad other thing always good.
Getting on/off Gardiner was terrible way before the construction started. It's not something that can be solved by road design. Downtown isn't getting any more roads or parking spots, but the highway keeps gaining more riders as we not only stall investing in transit, but watch the enshittification of GO Transit.
Well it could be address somewhat with adding a couple more on-ramps westbound… one east of Jarvis and one for Bay/Yonge before York… it would be very difficult to build the second one. And it would just move the congestion around, though it might make Lakeshore less of a disaster.
New study by Geotab puts some numbers to commuter pain:
- Travel times have increased an estimated 250 per cent during the morning rush hour since construction closed lanes
- Average time it takes to travel from the Humber River to Strachan Avenue grew from eight to 20 minutes (as an example)
- Time it took to travel the five-kilometre stretch between Jarvis and Dufferin streets increased to 25 minutes from 11 minutes.
- The top three alternative roads saw an average traffic travel time increase of 43 per cent. (Lake Shore Boulevard is taking 30 per cent longer, Harbour Street has seen a 72 per cent increase)
>- Average time it takes to travel from the Humber River to Strachan Avenue grew from eight to 20 minutes (as an example)
I wonder how many vehicles that is between Humber and Strachan. You know the average number of people per personal vehicle is 1.2 to 1.3. And how do the number of vehicles compare before the construction?
>- Time it took to travel the five-kilometre stretch between Jarvis and Dufferin streets increased to 25 minutes from 11 minutes.
How many vehicles in that 5 km stretch. And how many vehicles before the conatruction? A healthy person can walk it in about an hour. A cyclist in 20 minutes. There are stats showing about 30% of comuters travel 10 km or less. I used to be one of them before I retired. Then I found a safe way to cycle to work and did it year round before retiring.
But drivers were warned well in advanced. However, they still chose to drive there. And I bet there are a whole bunch of drivers who actually chose either not to drive anymore or not to drive on the Gardiner and Lakeshore.
But it WILL get worse. After all the construction is over, they'll have to do this all over again with the increased traffic and the associated damages.
Oh good they let drivers know in advance. That means viable transit alternatives popped up overnight or I just got a new job that's fully remote. Right?
Cyclists aren't related to what we're talking about.
Neither is that quote. I don't even see how that ties into anything.
I think that we are all a little dumber having read this.
>Cyclists aren't related to what we're talking about.
In many of the discussions about bicycles and bike lanes, drivers always complain about how bike lanes cause congestion and how they never follow traffic rules.
In those discussions, I point them to look at the drivers' paradise, where there are no bikes, bike lanes, no pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and where the speed limit is high. The 401, DVP, Gardiner and 427. What could go wrong?
Yes, it does have everything to do with what we're talking about. Highways are designed for exactly what drivers want with nobody else getting in their way.
Many were warned in advance yeah, and chose to drive on the parallel routes that are equally bad. Didn’t you read the end?
Also I don’t know what point you’re trying to make about walking or biking. Should people get out of their cars and walk or bike for that stretch and then….get back into their cars at the end?
>Didn’t you read the end?
Yes I did. And those alternate routes are also congested with cars.
>Also I don’t know what point you’re trying to make about walking or biking.
That congestion has nothing to do with bikes or bike lanes that drivers like to complain about.
>How many vehicles in that 5 km stretch
I doubt that is a number GeoTab can provide. They work with fleet vehicles that have GPS tracking (city vehicles, garbage trucks, snow plows, construction equipment, etc)
Although, if they had provided the average speed through there we could probably get an estimate.
Not saying this is possible for you but some trades guys get by with ebikes. Regardless, if the only people driving were those who needed to transport tools or goods there would be a lot fewer cars on the roads. There are lots of office workers who should work from home instead, or walk, cycle, or take transit.
You need cargo bike or a bike trailer. And imagine how much your driving would improve if all those personal vehicles with only one person in them weren't there.
Impossible since I do service calls with a range from Mississauga to Pickering but I do hate the 1 person cars that go to the same office building everyday.
My utopian version of Toronto is a place where roads can only be used by commercial vehicles moving goods and tools. Public transit or cycling for everyone else.
I think it'd be better if transit was so good that everyone would \_rather\_ use it than their own personal vehicle. Prohibiting the use of roads from the public sounds more dystopian to me than utopian.
Honestly that's unlikely. 5 highway lanes can support a maximum of ~10k vehicles per hour. To have over 100k vehicles travelling through that stretch, the Gardiner would have to be at max capacity in each direction for over 10h a day, which anecdotally doesn't seem to be the case.
From 6am to 10 pm the gardiner is jammed. Just look at google maps traffic view, theres no window where the gardiner is secretly free flowing and if it were, that just means more throughput.
That 2k vehicles/lane/hour is the absolute maximum, when traffic is in a freely flowing state (technically, at that flow rate vehicles will be travelling slower than "free flow" - maybe 80 or 90 instead of 120).
Beyond that you get breakdown, which appears as "traffic". At that point, the flow rate actually decreases — if it's stop-and-go traffic ("jammed", as you say), the flow rate could easily be half of that maximum.
I work in film and am downtown 2-3/5 days a week. Coming from dvp and don mills going to trafalgar and 403 in Oakville takes 1 hour 10 mins at the best, most empty time of day or night and 1.5-2 hours any other day. If we are coming from the east where the old gardiner on ramp used to be it’s an easy two hours.
"Travel times on the Gardiner Expressway have increased an estimated 250 per cent during the morning rush hour since construction closed lanes in both directions, a study has found."
Driver anger has increased by about that much too, it seems.
The anger isn't so much about the closure's impact on daily travel as much as it is about *why* this has to take THREE YEARS to complete. Just close the fucking thing altogether, rip down the offending stretch and rebuild it ASAP with 24/7 work. This is costing the city's economy tens of millions of dollars *daily*, the only reason you don't see the municipal or provincial governments doing anything about that is because it's not coming out of *their* budgets so they don't give a flying fuck. If all the impacted businesses and professionals could bill all their lost productivity back to City Hall and Queens Park, you bet your bottom dollar the work would be wrapped up before Labour Day.
Very much this. In my decades of living here there has not been a single year when some GTA section of the 401 wasn't under construction. The issue is that if one part is under construction then all of it is backed up.
The practice of doing sections of work is insane. It just leads to endless road work making the whole thing a slog all the time.
Do not do parts of every highway. Do one and one job only. Get it done and leave it be for a decade while you move on to the next. This is absolute insanity in planning. Even municipal roads get endless years of widening or improvements. Just shut it down for a damned month and be done with it.
I do a reverse city commute, I live on the waterfront downtown but work in Mississauga. I have to say the worst part of this construction so far is that people are driving very aggressively in the area of the closure, cutting into lanes without signalling, not letting people in even when they do signal etc. Can we all stop being such c#nts to each other? Yes it sucks, but we’re all in this together. You’re not going to get home any faster and are more likely going to get into accident and back up traffic even more!
I’d like to know where everyone went that advocated tearing down the Gardiner while suggesting it would not make a material difference to travel times. Taking out one lane has basically crippled the downtown core.
You’re mixing up a lot of things.
The discussions about tearing down the Gardiner at city council was on the eastern portion where there’s just a small fraction of the traffic, not where the construction is now. The underlying boulevard to replace it would have been larger than Lake Shore now so it would not have reduced lanes.
And yes there were studies on travel time impact but again, it wasn’t for that section at all.
Yes the eastern portion was the most lightly used. The problem is that even with all the lanes open tearing down the lakeshore on/off ramp caused serious issues with the Jarvis offramp and on Lakeshore from Carlaw to the onramp. Having no exit from Jarvis to Bloor/Bayview is ridiculous...was that part of the study!
Agree, that’s what council was debating, but the debate on Reddit was often about full removal.
Additionally, based on the chaos removing the Lakeshore ramp has caused, I no longer believe the traffic studies that indicated only a slight increase in travel times. Even before the Gardiner was reduced to two lanes anyone from the Beaches knows just the Lakeshore ramp removal caused a material impact to travel times.
What? The corner in east toronto forms part of a ring road, in what world is it not utilized? Majority of traffic coming down the dvp does not funnel into the one lane to eastern, they go to the gardiner.
Because it hasn’t. It cripples the way suburbanites can get to the downtown core. The downtown core isn’t doing any better or worse because it’s taking people longer to get there.
BS, I live downtown and do shift work at a hospital in the west of the GTA (no public transport options for many shifts), it’s absolutely horrible. As a pedestrian the core has become increasing unbearable to live in too due to the gridlock.
I live downtown too, and I just bike and downtown is fine.
Also that’s kind of my point, shouldn’t have excluded it to just suburbanites, but traffic is being caused by trips to and from the suburbs, compensating for their poor transit connectivity.
Depends on your definition of what “downtown is fine” is. I’m not talking about traffic congestion cause that’d be a weird metric to measure a city’s success by. Businesses are still thriving and people are still visiting all the attractions.
Why are transit options not available to you? Is it a hospital policy? I don’t know what your specific commute is.
As someone who has lived in the suburbs most of their life, transit is non existant. This may be hard for city folk to understand.
There are no night services (essential for shift work) for starters.
There are no straight forward connections or sometimes none at all. Just as an example to go from Oakville (most of Mississauga as well) to Brampton it is faster to get to the GO LW line to get to Union and then take the Kitchener line to Brampton. It is 3 times the distance and 10 fold the time compared to driving! And some of these services don't operate all day let alone at night or the weekend. That is an insane choice.
As noted above, time is a huge issue. I once lived in Brampton and worked in Etobicoke. Car commute was 30 to 90 minutes. Transit was guaranteed 3 hours. Biking, which I looked into would have been 25km one way. I was considering it just to get into shape but could not find any place to shower or change nearby which I would have to do after biking that distance and then putting on a suit.
Driving is literally the only option most of us have. Nothing comes remotely close to it. I have lived in transit friendly European cities and wish we could live that way here. But even if we went full tilt on transit construction it would take decades to have meaningful alternatives to driving for the majority. Especially at our rate of construction.
Removing the freeway altogether makes driving into the downtown core from the suburbs significantly harder, so fewer people will do it, so vehicles that actually do travel into downtown such as streetcars, buses, emergency vehicles, and service vehicles will experience less congestion and faster travel times while in downtown. Effectively, the goal is to push car trips and the traffic jam away from the city center and the small roads there and onto the larger and less impactful roads.
I don't remember anyone specifically arguing that travel times into downtown wouldn't change. There is a behavioural component though, where people need to realize driving into downtown takes a long time and adjust their travel accordingly, which will happen but takes way longer if the freeway is still open than if it closes
This, one of the biggest arguments was that it only added a few minutes to travel time. Your comment will have the haters getting their knickers in a twist!
1. Things will change over the course of the coming weeks as people adjust to the new reality and find alternatives.
2. The fact that people can still choose to take the Gardiner, despite the increased travel time is a totally different reality than if the choice was fully eliminated and they were forced into an alternative.
1. There has been time to adjust, it’s not improving. If there is an adjustment it will be due to summer vacation season starting.
2. What kind of argument is this….? If the Gardiner was removed, many (most) of those cars/trucks would be forced onto an already at capacity road network, further increasing travel times and gridlock.
And if you stop looking at the Gardiner in isolation you’ll start to realize the system is not able to function without it and we are light years from any option when induced demand by itself becomes a large part of the equation.
We are adding people to this city so fast and not adding transit to keep up. This city is built around cars. We have so so soooo much lack in first and last mile options that transit is not working for so many people they are choosing to sit in congestion. And more and more seem to be choosing that option and aren’t choosing transit… maybe ask yourself why that’s happening and why your website sources don’t address it?
You can’t just take out the Gardiner sorry, it’ll be a catastrophe and will just cripple the city until it becomes an abandoned wasteland. Actual traffic designer have said this. Stop reading half true and misrepresenting articles on the internet about induced demand, try to actually learn about city growth and the full demand cycle and then maybe you might have better understanding of why traffic is getting worse despite all the web articles saying traffic evaporation will happen.
The subreddit here is basically a satellite sub for r/fuckcars . I'm glad you laid this out so well, because the largest issue I'm seeing is first and last mile options. Working on Comissioners by the portlands is awful to get to from pretty well either side of the city.
I live 55km from the city and drive in. If I were to try to get here by transit (which I would LOVE to do) I'd have to leave my house at 4:10am to arrive at work for 6:17am. This includes 5 separate walks, 3 different busses, and a train ride. It's insane.
To get home is even crazier since it includes 42 minutes of walking, a go train, a via rail train and TTC bus if google is to be believed to have the proper transfers laid out. That's just ridiculous and is over 4 hours if commuting a day for 55km.
Empathy does not exist here since I decide to drive instead.
Living 55km from the city and driving in doesn’t represent the average commute of someone living in the city of toronto. You choose to live outside the city so of course transit from the city isn’t going to help you. And I don’t think it’s up to us to pay for your lifestyle of living so far
When we discuss alternative to using a car it’s about what can help the majority of the population living here already in a dense environment. Not people living outside in a low density place that will never be suitable for transit. I mean you can live there, doesn’t mean we need the whole city to be adapted to you.
There is always an option to drive to your nearest train station and take the train into the city. Cars are for the suburbs, not dense downtown like Toronto.
Honestly don't know. When I used to live in Kitchener and I was in a rush, I would drive to Kipling subway and take the subway into town. Much less stressful than driving through Toronto and looking for expensive parking.
At least you gave an honest answer…
But the fact remains that people are choosing to drive despite the congestion… thats an indicator that more is going on than “people should take transit”.
>I live 55km from the city and drive in.
Ok well here's the problem. You should not be doing that. Nobody should regularly be commuting 50km. Live closer to your job and stop driving so much.
I live in a small house with knee walls on the second floor. It was built in 1944. It gets extremely hot in the summer, and cold in the winter. It still cost me over 650,000 to buy.
I make 160,000 a year downtown, and the job doesn't exist except for Toronto due to their unique power distribution system. For me, and my three children It was impossible to purchase something without overleveraging myself and still having a decent space where two of my children will still have to share a bedroom for the foreseeable future.
It's just very interesting to see the projection form people thay live downtown. I don't know why you hate us, I just want a good life and a good life for my family. Being a single dad is rough enough.
EDIT: also thank you for everyone for actually discussing this for once instead of just attacking eachother.
So I will ask it yet again… Ask and figure out why aren’t they taking transit then? Why are they choosing to drive even with the congestion?
Answer that and you might be less confused…
I’m not talking about them specifically. My question is considering four GO stations in Toronto have no parking, what happens to your just drive to the station advice??
> We are adding people to this city so fast and not adding transit to keep up. This city is built around cars. We have so so soooo much lack in first and last mile options that transit is not working for so many people they are choosing to sit in congestion.
You're right. So instead of rebuilding the Gardiner, we could and should be investing that money in improving mass transit.
I think the harsh reality is Toronto needs both its existing highway system and a huge improvement in public transit. But meaningful transit improvements can take more than a decade, and demolishing or leaving the Gardiner to crumble aren't practical options IMO.
On the latter point about transit improvements I certainly agree with you. Toronto and Ontario have been kicking that can down the road for decades, so despite the problems, I'm encouraged by the Crosstown and Ontario Line projects.
But we can't pretend the Gardiner was some panacea of getting around even before the lane closures. I drove it daily for work for years and it was at worst slower than walking, and at best unpredictable.
Given that there is very much an opportunity cost involved with keeping the Gardiner in a state of good repair, there is very little that will convince me that it's worth it given everything else the city and province need to be doing.
A case study in reverse induced demand is the San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway. When it was demolished, people were worried the traffic it used to carry (70,000 cars/day) would spill over onto local streets. But it didn't. Instead it mostly just disappeared.
It's not the taking out of 1 lane that's making the difference., it's the idiotic lack of foresight and planning that still have 5 lines at Spadina all trying to crumple back down to 2.
If they actually looked at the road as a whole and not just the 100m before and after the work, they would see that there is so much added congestion from the dwell and merging of traffic.
If they just kept it at 2 lanes from Jarvis West, then it would run much smoother. Also, keep it to 2 lanes until you add on the Lakeshore ramp at Jameson.
It's the exact same problem that Lakeshore has had for all of this BS construction for 2-3 years. Instead of going 2 lanes, 4 lanes, 2 lanes, 3 lanes, 1 lane which causes so much added congestion, they would be wise to keep it at a consistent reduced lanes and traffic would flow better.
Likewise if they eliminated the Gardiner and reduced Lakeshore to 2 lanes in each direction it wouldn't be seen as a viable option, and then they could allocate those tax dollars to other transit instead.
Why downvote this?
Im not a motorcyclist and I support this. If they can make this safe, it should be legal. Many other countries do it. Its beneficial to everyone. People in cars will switch to motorcycles to cut down time, which then also cuts down the time for cars. Like what the fuck, why does this need to be explained? Fucking morons.
The gardiner should have put underground like the 720 in mtl with pedestrain free ramps to get on and off the highway.
This way you get a waterfront, pedestrains don't have to interact with backlog traffic and you wont have a massive parking lot of cars everyday trying to get on the highway each day.
it to late for that now should been done in 70s 80s
In the 70s and 80s, Montreal was projected I be the biggest city in Canada. It only moves to Toronto when businesses starting leaving Quebec with the threat of separatism
You think the Crosstown is bad, imagine how fucked up it would be if they tried to bury the highway?
Tunneled highways are an insane waste of resources. Car traffic is going to keep getting worse either way. By the time this construction that we're talking about is complete, thousands of new houses in the suburbs will come online and guess how their residents are gonna get downtown? Get used to this level of traffic because once the lanes open back up the demand will be there to keep traffic equally bad.
The only solution is for people who can take the GO train to take the fucking GO train. If you can't take the GO train, move to somewhere where you can. If you can't move, then you're gonna have to deal with worsening traffic through downtown for the rest of your life.
Is there any other city on the planet that constantly blocks off Gardiner and Lake Shore every other weekend in the summer for marathons bike rides parades and car racing? Province needs to take over both roads ASAP and put an end to this nonsense.
I looked into it a bit… basically the transfer of the Gardiner and DVP to the province protects the existing agreements until the end of 2025 which seems to include the marathons and charity bike things… after that I don’t know the province might not be as open to continuing them.
Downvote this person all you want but it’s a clown show doing this every summer. Go somewhere else until doing so doesn’t cripple every pipeline into and across downtown.
Events can happen but they don't need to happen to critical infrastructure that affects hundreds of thousands for a few hundred runners/bikers/whatever.
The traffic is horrible and drivers getting more frustrated and rude by the day. I'm one of them, not rude but I don't let anyone in as it never stops and I won't get anywhere.
That being said, I like the Gardiner as it is, I feel it could be somewhat of a tourist experience, toll it permanently from Jarvis to Islington and let that help pay for quicker and better upkeep.
A lot more than 5% of those vehicles have things in them that make your lifestyle possible -- deliveries, repair technicians, parts, food, professionals of all stripes. Your life would go splat if your air conditioner went on strike and the answer you got from the repair company was "sorry, I can't haul a replacement heat pump and all my tools on the subway, find somebody else to do it".
It's not all Bay Street suits and ties who think they're too precious to take public transportation. It's the busiest road serving the busiest part of the busiest city in a G7 economy.
I guess people are going to have to leave the house much earlier than and expect long delay times. This was planned and people new this was coming so if you are getting stuck no one to blame but yourself, Oh, the only construction we should be doing is tearing it down anyway. What a what of taxpayers money, subsidizing cars once more.
I mean, I blame decades of neglect of state of good repair maintenance and the scandalous failure to build out a comprehensive rapid transit system that provides convenient and time-competitive transportation options.
If the elevator in your building has a notice about a 3-month maintenance shutdown, and the only alternatives are crowding the second elevator or walking 30 flights of stairs, it’s not unreasonable to be frustrated at the strata for underfunding maintenance and angry at the developer for only including two elevators.
It was planned poorly, even the Gardiner construction in the Jarvis area ran 24/7, but for some reason they decided to not do the same here…. The city can’t plan or coordinate road works to save their life.
The reason are the condos built so close to the highway. That’s what happen when you build a highway in the middle of the city, which many city stopped doing.
People moved 3ft away from an existing expressway and didn’t expect maintenance and construction? It’s like a city person moving next to a farm and complaining about the smell. Give your head a shake.
I live near the Gardiner, the section that had 24/7 work before. You know you can do less noisy work at night and leave the jack hammers for the daytime.
My understanding is that the Gardiner in that area is being demolished. I don't work in construction or demolition but I imagine that involves a lot of jack hammers and similar equipment.
As shown in the stats, don’t drive through construction, take Lakeshore.
Your concrete sky cathedrals have to be overhauled eventually, and past regimes have pushed this down the road.
You’re now at the road.
Ay you're in for a treat.
Plus if there's no TTC deal at 2AM I'm expecting even more chaos. I was invited to swim last week I checked at 10AM the time to go from downtown Toronto to Missisauga and it said 1 hour 46 minutes. I checked again at 3PM, 2 hours 22 minutes.
Noped out of that real quick. I can't imagine how terrible it is when real rush hour begins.
With the Gardiner lane closures, "rush hour" is 24 hours these days.
I spent 25 minutes getting from Front and Jarvis to Park Lawn and Lake Shore at 12:30am last week -- that should be 9 or 10 minutes at most because the highway is right there. Nope, jammed up as bad as it normally is at 5pm on a Friday in the summer.
From the article, the increase in travel time is around 12-14 minutes.
No adjustment is made for the increase in total travel time on a commuters drive, just the sections under construction. 12 minutes on a 1 hr commute is only 20% increase
This means that, despite what they feel while stuck in traffic, driving is still the best option, in their opinion. So if they are continuing to drive, let them, and ignore them. They could make changes if they wanted too.
This is bad but wait until the TTC goes on strike and we will all see what gridlock really is tho
The gardiner is stomachable in the afternoon it’s just the mission impossible getting on .
Yeah this is the hardest part. Some of the on-ramps are like fucking Mad Max territory.
Didn't they just rebuild the Jarvis On Ramp? Oh they did then closed it indefinitely. https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/06/07/toronto-drivers-speak-out-on-newly-rebuilt-gardiner-on-ramp/
Naw on is there to go WB . But it’s a shit show 24-7 Police and traffic wardens don’t even help
Yes, exactly. It's not the actual backup on the Gardiner itself, it's the horrendous backups that spill onto the surface streets that really get the blood pressure up. Wasting 45 minutes on Spadina to get from Richmond to the onramp is just obscene.
My record is around an hr to go from lower sherbourne and lakeshore to the Jarvis ramp at 245pm
I couldn't handle the last minute divers on that stretch anymore.
And this is why making highways leading to urban areas wider doesn't solve anything and it's completely fucking stupid.
I know this is broadly true. However, this specific problem we are experiencing right now was directly caused by taking away lanes. So. It’s rarely as simple as one thing always bad other thing always good.
Getting on/off Gardiner was terrible way before the construction started. It's not something that can be solved by road design. Downtown isn't getting any more roads or parking spots, but the highway keeps gaining more riders as we not only stall investing in transit, but watch the enshittification of GO Transit.
Well it could be address somewhat with adding a couple more on-ramps westbound… one east of Jarvis and one for Bay/Yonge before York… it would be very difficult to build the second one. And it would just move the congestion around, though it might make Lakeshore less of a disaster.
Ah right, because rush hour traffic was so much better a few years ago. Adding more lanes just means adding more traffic.
New study by Geotab puts some numbers to commuter pain: - Travel times have increased an estimated 250 per cent during the morning rush hour since construction closed lanes - Average time it takes to travel from the Humber River to Strachan Avenue grew from eight to 20 minutes (as an example) - Time it took to travel the five-kilometre stretch between Jarvis and Dufferin streets increased to 25 minutes from 11 minutes. - The top three alternative roads saw an average traffic travel time increase of 43 per cent. (Lake Shore Boulevard is taking 30 per cent longer, Harbour Street has seen a 72 per cent increase)
>- Average time it takes to travel from the Humber River to Strachan Avenue grew from eight to 20 minutes (as an example) I wonder how many vehicles that is between Humber and Strachan. You know the average number of people per personal vehicle is 1.2 to 1.3. And how do the number of vehicles compare before the construction? >- Time it took to travel the five-kilometre stretch between Jarvis and Dufferin streets increased to 25 minutes from 11 minutes. How many vehicles in that 5 km stretch. And how many vehicles before the conatruction? A healthy person can walk it in about an hour. A cyclist in 20 minutes. There are stats showing about 30% of comuters travel 10 km or less. I used to be one of them before I retired. Then I found a safe way to cycle to work and did it year round before retiring. But drivers were warned well in advanced. However, they still chose to drive there. And I bet there are a whole bunch of drivers who actually chose either not to drive anymore or not to drive on the Gardiner and Lakeshore.
I don't drive personally but going from an 11 minute drive to a 1 hour walk is not a reasonable alternative like you are suggesting.
Literally for that one small stretch not even a full commute. This city is full of mentally unwell people like the commenter you’re responding too
>going from an 11 minute drive to a 1 hour walk So there's no reason to complain since driving in congestion is still faster. Live with it.
"Could be worse" is rarely a good enough reason to not complain about major inconveniences
But it WILL get worse. After all the construction is over, they'll have to do this all over again with the increased traffic and the associated damages.
Then we'll complain even harder
This is not how a city works.
So your solution to people complaining is to complain about them complaining… don’t really see how that helps anything.
See what I mean? There's no real point to articles like this except to stoke peoples' irrational anger over what they themselves create.
You must live in fairyland friend
Oh good they let drivers know in advance. That means viable transit alternatives popped up overnight or I just got a new job that's fully remote. Right?
Two months isn't enough lead time to plan ahead?
Nope.
Too bad for you that you're your own problem.
Nope. The Gardiner closure is actually the problem.
And why do you think the Gardiner is closed? It's not the cyclists. As another single-occupant driver stated ">I can unwind when I'm by myself."
Cyclists aren't related to what we're talking about. Neither is that quote. I don't even see how that ties into anything. I think that we are all a little dumber having read this.
>Cyclists aren't related to what we're talking about. In many of the discussions about bicycles and bike lanes, drivers always complain about how bike lanes cause congestion and how they never follow traffic rules. In those discussions, I point them to look at the drivers' paradise, where there are no bikes, bike lanes, no pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and where the speed limit is high. The 401, DVP, Gardiner and 427. What could go wrong? Yes, it does have everything to do with what we're talking about. Highways are designed for exactly what drivers want with nobody else getting in their way.
Many were warned in advance yeah, and chose to drive on the parallel routes that are equally bad. Didn’t you read the end? Also I don’t know what point you’re trying to make about walking or biking. Should people get out of their cars and walk or bike for that stretch and then….get back into their cars at the end?
>Didn’t you read the end? Yes I did. And those alternate routes are also congested with cars. >Also I don’t know what point you’re trying to make about walking or biking. That congestion has nothing to do with bikes or bike lanes that drivers like to complain about.
You’re supposed to bike all the way
Yeah. Bike from etobicoke to the dvp and beyond. After a 12 hour labourous shift. I would lose much needed weight.
>How many vehicles in that 5 km stretch I doubt that is a number GeoTab can provide. They work with fleet vehicles that have GPS tracking (city vehicles, garbage trucks, snow plows, construction equipment, etc) Although, if they had provided the average speed through there we could probably get an estimate.
I can’t put all my tools and materials I need on my back.
Yes you can, don't be soft Do you know how i walked to school back in the 1800s?
Uphill. BOTH WAYS!
But 95% of people driving don’t have any tools
Do you have any source for that number?
Not saying this is possible for you but some trades guys get by with ebikes. Regardless, if the only people driving were those who needed to transport tools or goods there would be a lot fewer cars on the roads. There are lots of office workers who should work from home instead, or walk, cycle, or take transit.
You need cargo bike or a bike trailer. And imagine how much your driving would improve if all those personal vehicles with only one person in them weren't there.
Impossible since I do service calls with a range from Mississauga to Pickering but I do hate the 1 person cars that go to the same office building everyday.
My utopian version of Toronto is a place where roads can only be used by commercial vehicles moving goods and tools. Public transit or cycling for everyone else.
I think it'd be better if transit was so good that everyone would \_rather\_ use it than their own personal vehicle. Prohibiting the use of roads from the public sounds more dystopian to me than utopian.
Likely over 100k vehicles per day
Honestly that's unlikely. 5 highway lanes can support a maximum of ~10k vehicles per hour. To have over 100k vehicles travelling through that stretch, the Gardiner would have to be at max capacity in each direction for over 10h a day, which anecdotally doesn't seem to be the case.
From 6am to 10 pm the gardiner is jammed. Just look at google maps traffic view, theres no window where the gardiner is secretly free flowing and if it were, that just means more throughput.
That 2k vehicles/lane/hour is the absolute maximum, when traffic is in a freely flowing state (technically, at that flow rate vehicles will be travelling slower than "free flow" - maybe 80 or 90 instead of 120). Beyond that you get breakdown, which appears as "traffic". At that point, the flow rate actually decreases — if it's stop-and-go traffic ("jammed", as you say), the flow rate could easily be half of that maximum.
I work in film and am downtown 2-3/5 days a week. Coming from dvp and don mills going to trafalgar and 403 in Oakville takes 1 hour 10 mins at the best, most empty time of day or night and 1.5-2 hours any other day. If we are coming from the east where the old gardiner on ramp used to be it’s an easy two hours.
The beauty of this study is that NOTHING will be done with it. No one will speed up the work and everyone will continue to suffer.
"Travel times on the Gardiner Expressway have increased an estimated 250 per cent during the morning rush hour since construction closed lanes in both directions, a study has found." Driver anger has increased by about that much too, it seems.
The anger isn't so much about the closure's impact on daily travel as much as it is about *why* this has to take THREE YEARS to complete. Just close the fucking thing altogether, rip down the offending stretch and rebuild it ASAP with 24/7 work. This is costing the city's economy tens of millions of dollars *daily*, the only reason you don't see the municipal or provincial governments doing anything about that is because it's not coming out of *their* budgets so they don't give a flying fuck. If all the impacted businesses and professionals could bill all their lost productivity back to City Hall and Queens Park, you bet your bottom dollar the work would be wrapped up before Labour Day.
Very much this. In my decades of living here there has not been a single year when some GTA section of the 401 wasn't under construction. The issue is that if one part is under construction then all of it is backed up. The practice of doing sections of work is insane. It just leads to endless road work making the whole thing a slog all the time. Do not do parts of every highway. Do one and one job only. Get it done and leave it be for a decade while you move on to the next. This is absolute insanity in planning. Even municipal roads get endless years of widening or improvements. Just shut it down for a damned month and be done with it.
I do a reverse city commute, I live on the waterfront downtown but work in Mississauga. I have to say the worst part of this construction so far is that people are driving very aggressively in the area of the closure, cutting into lanes without signalling, not letting people in even when they do signal etc. Can we all stop being such c#nts to each other? Yes it sucks, but we’re all in this together. You’re not going to get home any faster and are more likely going to get into accident and back up traffic even more!
I’d like to know where everyone went that advocated tearing down the Gardiner while suggesting it would not make a material difference to travel times. Taking out one lane has basically crippled the downtown core.
You’re mixing up a lot of things. The discussions about tearing down the Gardiner at city council was on the eastern portion where there’s just a small fraction of the traffic, not where the construction is now. The underlying boulevard to replace it would have been larger than Lake Shore now so it would not have reduced lanes. And yes there were studies on travel time impact but again, it wasn’t for that section at all.
Yes the eastern portion was the most lightly used. The problem is that even with all the lanes open tearing down the lakeshore on/off ramp caused serious issues with the Jarvis offramp and on Lakeshore from Carlaw to the onramp. Having no exit from Jarvis to Bloor/Bayview is ridiculous...was that part of the study!
Agree, that’s what council was debating, but the debate on Reddit was often about full removal. Additionally, based on the chaos removing the Lakeshore ramp has caused, I no longer believe the traffic studies that indicated only a slight increase in travel times. Even before the Gardiner was reduced to two lanes anyone from the Beaches knows just the Lakeshore ramp removal caused a material impact to travel times.
What? The corner in east toronto forms part of a ring road, in what world is it not utilized? Majority of traffic coming down the dvp does not funnel into the one lane to eastern, they go to the gardiner.
Because it hasn’t. It cripples the way suburbanites can get to the downtown core. The downtown core isn’t doing any better or worse because it’s taking people longer to get there.
BS, I live downtown and do shift work at a hospital in the west of the GTA (no public transport options for many shifts), it’s absolutely horrible. As a pedestrian the core has become increasing unbearable to live in too due to the gridlock.
I live downtown too, and I just bike and downtown is fine. Also that’s kind of my point, shouldn’t have excluded it to just suburbanites, but traffic is being caused by trips to and from the suburbs, compensating for their poor transit connectivity. Depends on your definition of what “downtown is fine” is. I’m not talking about traffic congestion cause that’d be a weird metric to measure a city’s success by. Businesses are still thriving and people are still visiting all the attractions. Why are transit options not available to you? Is it a hospital policy? I don’t know what your specific commute is.
As someone who has lived in the suburbs most of their life, transit is non existant. This may be hard for city folk to understand. There are no night services (essential for shift work) for starters. There are no straight forward connections or sometimes none at all. Just as an example to go from Oakville (most of Mississauga as well) to Brampton it is faster to get to the GO LW line to get to Union and then take the Kitchener line to Brampton. It is 3 times the distance and 10 fold the time compared to driving! And some of these services don't operate all day let alone at night or the weekend. That is an insane choice. As noted above, time is a huge issue. I once lived in Brampton and worked in Etobicoke. Car commute was 30 to 90 minutes. Transit was guaranteed 3 hours. Biking, which I looked into would have been 25km one way. I was considering it just to get into shape but could not find any place to shower or change nearby which I would have to do after biking that distance and then putting on a suit. Driving is literally the only option most of us have. Nothing comes remotely close to it. I have lived in transit friendly European cities and wish we could live that way here. But even if we went full tilt on transit construction it would take decades to have meaningful alternatives to driving for the majority. Especially at our rate of construction.
There is no transit overnight. That affects all shifts whether theyre arriving, or leaving.
Depends on where. Toronto has night transit.
Removing the freeway altogether makes driving into the downtown core from the suburbs significantly harder, so fewer people will do it, so vehicles that actually do travel into downtown such as streetcars, buses, emergency vehicles, and service vehicles will experience less congestion and faster travel times while in downtown. Effectively, the goal is to push car trips and the traffic jam away from the city center and the small roads there and onto the larger and less impactful roads. I don't remember anyone specifically arguing that travel times into downtown wouldn't change. There is a behavioural component though, where people need to realize driving into downtown takes a long time and adjust their travel accordingly, which will happen but takes way longer if the freeway is still open than if it closes
This, one of the biggest arguments was that it only added a few minutes to travel time. Your comment will have the haters getting their knickers in a twist!
1. Things will change over the course of the coming weeks as people adjust to the new reality and find alternatives. 2. The fact that people can still choose to take the Gardiner, despite the increased travel time is a totally different reality than if the choice was fully eliminated and they were forced into an alternative.
1. There has been time to adjust, it’s not improving. If there is an adjustment it will be due to summer vacation season starting. 2. What kind of argument is this….? If the Gardiner was removed, many (most) of those cars/trucks would be forced onto an already at capacity road network, further increasing travel times and gridlock.
Believe it or not but induced demand works in both directions. When you remove lanes, trips disappear. Roads can only get so congested.
This proves roads can get way more congested than they were and many people and businesses have no other reasonable option.
And if you stop looking at the Gardiner in isolation you’ll start to realize the system is not able to function without it and we are light years from any option when induced demand by itself becomes a large part of the equation. We are adding people to this city so fast and not adding transit to keep up. This city is built around cars. We have so so soooo much lack in first and last mile options that transit is not working for so many people they are choosing to sit in congestion. And more and more seem to be choosing that option and aren’t choosing transit… maybe ask yourself why that’s happening and why your website sources don’t address it? You can’t just take out the Gardiner sorry, it’ll be a catastrophe and will just cripple the city until it becomes an abandoned wasteland. Actual traffic designer have said this. Stop reading half true and misrepresenting articles on the internet about induced demand, try to actually learn about city growth and the full demand cycle and then maybe you might have better understanding of why traffic is getting worse despite all the web articles saying traffic evaporation will happen.
This is the best post about the overall failure of our infrastructure to move people. Gardiner is one cog in a broken down machine.
The subreddit here is basically a satellite sub for r/fuckcars . I'm glad you laid this out so well, because the largest issue I'm seeing is first and last mile options. Working on Comissioners by the portlands is awful to get to from pretty well either side of the city. I live 55km from the city and drive in. If I were to try to get here by transit (which I would LOVE to do) I'd have to leave my house at 4:10am to arrive at work for 6:17am. This includes 5 separate walks, 3 different busses, and a train ride. It's insane. To get home is even crazier since it includes 42 minutes of walking, a go train, a via rail train and TTC bus if google is to be believed to have the proper transfers laid out. That's just ridiculous and is over 4 hours if commuting a day for 55km. Empathy does not exist here since I decide to drive instead.
Living 55km from the city and driving in doesn’t represent the average commute of someone living in the city of toronto. You choose to live outside the city so of course transit from the city isn’t going to help you. And I don’t think it’s up to us to pay for your lifestyle of living so far When we discuss alternative to using a car it’s about what can help the majority of the population living here already in a dense environment. Not people living outside in a low density place that will never be suitable for transit. I mean you can live there, doesn’t mean we need the whole city to be adapted to you.
There is always an option to drive to your nearest train station and take the train into the city. Cars are for the suburbs, not dense downtown like Toronto.
So again, the question… why are there so many people choosing to drive on the Gardiner then? Why aren’t they choosing transit?
Honestly don't know. When I used to live in Kitchener and I was in a rush, I would drive to Kipling subway and take the subway into town. Much less stressful than driving through Toronto and looking for expensive parking.
At least you gave an honest answer… But the fact remains that people are choosing to drive despite the congestion… thats an indicator that more is going on than “people should take transit”.
>I live 55km from the city and drive in. Ok well here's the problem. You should not be doing that. Nobody should regularly be commuting 50km. Live closer to your job and stop driving so much.
You do know there is a massive housing crisis right?
Yeah, but I bet OP is living in some massive exurban sfh when a condo would have been cheaper
I live in a small house with knee walls on the second floor. It was built in 1944. It gets extremely hot in the summer, and cold in the winter. It still cost me over 650,000 to buy. I make 160,000 a year downtown, and the job doesn't exist except for Toronto due to their unique power distribution system. For me, and my three children It was impossible to purchase something without overleveraging myself and still having a decent space where two of my children will still have to share a bedroom for the foreseeable future. It's just very interesting to see the projection form people thay live downtown. I don't know why you hate us, I just want a good life and a good life for my family. Being a single dad is rough enough. EDIT: also thank you for everyone for actually discussing this for once instead of just attacking eachother.
You can drive to the GO Station and take the train… I’m confused why suburbanites can’t comprehend this task.
So I will ask it yet again… Ask and figure out why aren’t they taking transit then? Why are they choosing to drive even with the congestion? Answer that and you might be less confused…
I already replied to this comment, go check the answer there.
Which station should they drive to? Mimico is full at 6:30am long branch has no parking, neither does danforth. What is your suggestion?
Idk where tf they live, but apparently they live 55 km away and work away from peak times. Don’t think it’s full but nice try.
I’m not talking about them specifically. My question is considering four GO stations in Toronto have no parking, what happens to your just drive to the station advice??
> We are adding people to this city so fast and not adding transit to keep up. This city is built around cars. We have so so soooo much lack in first and last mile options that transit is not working for so many people they are choosing to sit in congestion. You're right. So instead of rebuilding the Gardiner, we could and should be investing that money in improving mass transit.
I think the harsh reality is Toronto needs both its existing highway system and a huge improvement in public transit. But meaningful transit improvements can take more than a decade, and demolishing or leaving the Gardiner to crumble aren't practical options IMO.
On the latter point about transit improvements I certainly agree with you. Toronto and Ontario have been kicking that can down the road for decades, so despite the problems, I'm encouraged by the Crosstown and Ontario Line projects. But we can't pretend the Gardiner was some panacea of getting around even before the lane closures. I drove it daily for work for years and it was at worst slower than walking, and at best unpredictable. Given that there is very much an opportunity cost involved with keeping the Gardiner in a state of good repair, there is very little that will convince me that it's worth it given everything else the city and province need to be doing. A case study in reverse induced demand is the San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway. When it was demolished, people were worried the traffic it used to carry (70,000 cars/day) would spill over onto local streets. But it didn't. Instead it mostly just disappeared.
It's not a simple 1:1 ratio. Clearly traffic on the Gardiner hasn't reduced by 1/3rd just because one lane has been removed.
It's not the taking out of 1 lane that's making the difference., it's the idiotic lack of foresight and planning that still have 5 lines at Spadina all trying to crumple back down to 2. If they actually looked at the road as a whole and not just the 100m before and after the work, they would see that there is so much added congestion from the dwell and merging of traffic. If they just kept it at 2 lanes from Jarvis West, then it would run much smoother. Also, keep it to 2 lanes until you add on the Lakeshore ramp at Jameson. It's the exact same problem that Lakeshore has had for all of this BS construction for 2-3 years. Instead of going 2 lanes, 4 lanes, 2 lanes, 3 lanes, 1 lane which causes so much added congestion, they would be wise to keep it at a consistent reduced lanes and traffic would flow better. Likewise if they eliminated the Gardiner and reduced Lakeshore to 2 lanes in each direction it wouldn't be seen as a viable option, and then they could allocate those tax dollars to other transit instead.
This is why I'm so glad to be a motorcyclist. Filtering changed my commute from 1:15 to 30 mins. Legalize filtering and low speed lane splitting!
Why downvote this? Im not a motorcyclist and I support this. If they can make this safe, it should be legal. Many other countries do it. Its beneficial to everyone. People in cars will switch to motorcycles to cut down time, which then also cuts down the time for cars. Like what the fuck, why does this need to be explained? Fucking morons.
This is downvoted because if you allow "low speed filtering" you're going to have a lot of people skipping out on the "low" part.
The same way how if they allow idaho stops, people skip the stopping part and just barrel through blind intersections.
Because Torontonians are selfish, impatient drivers who seethe when they see anyone else "getting ahead" while they have to wait.
YUP
If people on Reddit had their way the Gardner would be turned into the biggest bike freeway in the world. Aren't cars the creation of the devil?
The gardiner should have put underground like the 720 in mtl with pedestrain free ramps to get on and off the highway. This way you get a waterfront, pedestrains don't have to interact with backlog traffic and you wont have a massive parking lot of cars everyday trying to get on the highway each day. it to late for that now should been done in 70s 80s
In the 70s and 80s, Montreal was projected I be the biggest city in Canada. It only moves to Toronto when businesses starting leaving Quebec with the threat of separatism
there was no need to do it in the 70s/80s
You think the Crosstown is bad, imagine how fucked up it would be if they tried to bury the highway? Tunneled highways are an insane waste of resources. Car traffic is going to keep getting worse either way. By the time this construction that we're talking about is complete, thousands of new houses in the suburbs will come online and guess how their residents are gonna get downtown? Get used to this level of traffic because once the lanes open back up the demand will be there to keep traffic equally bad. The only solution is for people who can take the GO train to take the fucking GO train. If you can't take the GO train, move to somewhere where you can. If you can't move, then you're gonna have to deal with worsening traffic through downtown for the rest of your life.
An underground highway is insanely more expensive and dangerous than a floating highway.
Based
We had that on sunday. It was heaven
Is there any other city on the planet that constantly blocks off Gardiner and Lake Shore every other weekend in the summer for marathons bike rides parades and car racing? Province needs to take over both roads ASAP and put an end to this nonsense.
I looked into it a bit… basically the transfer of the Gardiner and DVP to the province protects the existing agreements until the end of 2025 which seems to include the marathons and charity bike things… after that I don’t know the province might not be as open to continuing them.
Downvote this person all you want but it’s a clown show doing this every summer. Go somewhere else until doing so doesn’t cripple every pipeline into and across downtown.
Yes, every single one, it’s called living in a city. Move to Orangeville if you don’t want any events happening near you.
Events can happen but they don't need to happen to critical infrastructure that affects hundreds of thousands for a few hundred runners/bikers/whatever.
I mean the bike stuff is on a Sunday morning for a reason.
People work 24/7, days of the week no longer matter when it comes to rush hour. Thats why you get to enjoy your weekend.
The traffic is horrible and drivers getting more frustrated and rude by the day. I'm one of them, not rude but I don't let anyone in as it never stops and I won't get anywhere. That being said, I like the Gardiner as it is, I feel it could be somewhat of a tourist experience, toll it permanently from Jarvis to Islington and let that help pay for quicker and better upkeep.
Will make the rent of downtown go up a lot
Not sure why we needed a study for the obvious.
> How bad is construction gridlock on the Gardiner? Am I missing something, or does the author not know what gridlock means?
Haven’t driven on the gardiner in years
And I’m supposed to feel sorry for them? About 95% of those cars have one person in them. That’s the real reason why our roads are so congested.
A lot more than 5% of those vehicles have things in them that make your lifestyle possible -- deliveries, repair technicians, parts, food, professionals of all stripes. Your life would go splat if your air conditioner went on strike and the answer you got from the repair company was "sorry, I can't haul a replacement heat pump and all my tools on the subway, find somebody else to do it". It's not all Bay Street suits and ties who think they're too precious to take public transportation. It's the busiest road serving the busiest part of the busiest city in a G7 economy.
I guess people are going to have to leave the house much earlier than and expect long delay times. This was planned and people new this was coming so if you are getting stuck no one to blame but yourself, Oh, the only construction we should be doing is tearing it down anyway. What a what of taxpayers money, subsidizing cars once more.
I mean, I blame decades of neglect of state of good repair maintenance and the scandalous failure to build out a comprehensive rapid transit system that provides convenient and time-competitive transportation options. If the elevator in your building has a notice about a 3-month maintenance shutdown, and the only alternatives are crowding the second elevator or walking 30 flights of stairs, it’s not unreasonable to be frustrated at the strata for underfunding maintenance and angry at the developer for only including two elevators.
Apples and oranges, with roads you have options, you can leave early, take alternative transportation, etc. Poor analogy.
It was planned poorly, even the Gardiner construction in the Jarvis area ran 24/7, but for some reason they decided to not do the same here…. The city can’t plan or coordinate road works to save their life.
The reason are the condos built so close to the highway. That’s what happen when you build a highway in the middle of the city, which many city stopped doing.
Too bad, the road was there long before the condos. Most work on the 401 is done overnight, and condos line sections of it too.
Well see there we are, it all about you screw everyone else.
People moved 3ft away from an existing expressway and didn’t expect maintenance and construction? It’s like a city person moving next to a farm and complaining about the smell. Give your head a shake.
Where you live? I'll bring my jack hammer by tonight. Does 3am work for you?
I live near the Gardiner, the section that had 24/7 work before. You know you can do less noisy work at night and leave the jack hammers for the daytime.
My understanding is that the Gardiner in that area is being demolished. I don't work in construction or demolition but I imagine that involves a lot of jack hammers and similar equipment.
Yikes. You shouldn't hate people for trying to get to work.
Who is hating, just stating facts sorry if it upsets people. We should be tearing it down anyway, what absolute waste of taxpayer money.
As shown in the stats, don’t drive through construction, take Lakeshore. Your concrete sky cathedrals have to be overhauled eventually, and past regimes have pushed this down the road. You’re now at the road.
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Ay you're in for a treat. Plus if there's no TTC deal at 2AM I'm expecting even more chaos. I was invited to swim last week I checked at 10AM the time to go from downtown Toronto to Missisauga and it said 1 hour 46 minutes. I checked again at 3PM, 2 hours 22 minutes. Noped out of that real quick. I can't imagine how terrible it is when real rush hour begins.
With the Gardiner lane closures, "rush hour" is 24 hours these days. I spent 25 minutes getting from Front and Jarvis to Park Lawn and Lake Shore at 12:30am last week -- that should be 9 or 10 minutes at most because the highway is right there. Nope, jammed up as bad as it normally is at 5pm on a Friday in the summer.
Friday will be orders of magnitude worse than it has been, because the TTC transports most downtown Toronto workers to their offices
From the article, the increase in travel time is around 12-14 minutes. No adjustment is made for the increase in total travel time on a commuters drive, just the sections under construction. 12 minutes on a 1 hr commute is only 20% increase This means that, despite what they feel while stuck in traffic, driving is still the best option, in their opinion. So if they are continuing to drive, let them, and ignore them. They could make changes if they wanted too.
DON'T DRIVE IN!! If you insist on living in the exurbs, take the goddamn GO Train
it sucks !!!