Tuesday, October 03, 2006

 

Something we can all agree on - The Gardiner has to go

I noticed an interesting thing about the Gardiner Expressway the other day: a commitment to tearing it down is bringing together people who don't normally see eye to eye. For example, in separate articles in the Toronto Star, columnists Christopher Hume and Royson James each advocated taking down the Gardiner and each for reasons you wouldn't expect them to give.

James wrote that by tearing down the Gardiner "we stand to gain a status that is reserved for the truly forward-thinking and visionary cities on the planet." Hume made the economic argument that "the take-down will also pay for itself through increased property taxes paid by occupants of the countless condos that now line the Gardiner, as well as those yet to be built." Each strong points on their own, made stronger when put together.

The Gardiner Expressway is a relic from a past when it was thought that the purpose of a city was to facilitate automobile traffic. It may have been a wonderful testament to city-building 40 years ago, but today the Gardiner Expressway is a monument to the failure of the car as a mass transportation system. Continuing to think that we can tinker with the Gardiner, for not much less than the cost tearing it down, will only keep us from building the public transportation we need to support a region expected to grow by 4 million people over the next 20 years.

You won't hear this often, so I'll say it again: Royson James and Christopher Hume are both right. The opportunity lost by not taking the Gardiner down far outweighs the investment we can make now to build the city we want to live in for the next 10, 20, 50 years.

The residents of Toronto 50 years from now will look back to this moment and say, "That is how we got here." Let's do something to make them proud. Let's recognize that the Gardiner has come to the end of its life, take it down, and allow Toronto to reconnect with it's waterfront.

posted by Rob Newman  # 11:32 PM 0 comments   

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