OTA Opposes New Gardiner Expressway Proposal

February 18, 1999

OTA has made a presentation before the City of Toronto's Urban Environment and Development Committee, opposing a new proposal for reconfiguring and tolling the Gardiner Expressway.

This new proposal was put forward by a private sector company, the Canadian Highways International Corporation (CHIC), the company that built Highway 407. The CHIC proposal seeks to substitute the elevated, central section of the Gardiner Expressway with a below-grade facility of similar or improved capacity and to charge a toll for

the new road to cover costs and generate an economic return on the investment. The CHIC proposal is conceptual so many details remain unknown. Here is what is known:

• The first phase of the CHIC proposal would address the elevated section of the expressway between Dufferin Street (where it begins to rise) to a point east of Yonge Street. This phase is estimated to take six years to complete at a cost of $1 billion;
• A second phase would involve the section of the expressway east of Yonge Street over to the Don River. The second phase of the project has no cost estimate and is expected to take a further three to four years to complete.

Regarding the toll, preliminary estimates suggest an average toll per vehicle, travelling westward on the expressway, would be in the range of $1.50 to $2.00/vehicle. This toll collection would finance the cost of dismantling the Dufferin to Yonge section of the Gardiner. There is no detailed explanation of how this price range was calculated or how it might change if the project is expanded to include the Yonge Street to the Don River section. East-bound tolls were not addressed either.

OTA objected to this proposal based on the toll issue and the traffic chaos that would be wreaked upon Toronto traffic in the absence of the Gardiner Expressway for a ten-year period.

Only days after this meeting, Toronto mayor Mel Lastman said the proposal is dead unless proponents can offer better reasons to proceed. Lastman told the Toronto Star that "unless people have some good reasons why it should go ahead, it's dead. And I don't see any good reasons yet."