The Gardiner East is being rebuilt. Was the hybrid the right call?

The eastern end of the Gardiner has been studied, decided, re-decided and reversed for the better part of thirty years, and the meter has been running the entire time.

What was decided is the hybrid: keep the elevated section between Jarvis and Cherry, which was rebuilt with prefabricated deck sections in 2021, and swing the piece east of Cherry north to meet the DVP on a new alignment. The Logan ramps closed for good in 2021. The Cherry-to-Don-Roadway work runs from this year to 2030, with new ramps in the Keating Channel precinct and a widened bridge over the Don. And under the 2023 deal between the city and the province, the Gardiner and the DVP are being handed to Ontario, which took the maintenance bill off Toronto and, some would say, the decision with it.

The case for keeping it is regional. A large share of the people who drive it are not from Toronto. They are coming in from Durham and going out to Etobicoke, and the alternative surface routes through downtown are already the slowest streets in the country.

The case for taking it down was that the elevated structure severs the waterfront from the city behind it, that the eastern portion carries a fraction of what the western does, and that the maintenance cost of an ageing elevated highway never stops.

The hybrid satisfied neither camp and cost more than the boulevard. It is what happens when a decision has to survive an election. The question now is whether it was the right one.

Sources: City of Toronto, the Gardiner and Lake Shore East reconfiguration · City of Toronto, the rehabilitation plan · Waterfront Toronto, Lake Shore Boulevard East