Toronto’s sci-fi love for the Gardiner
The Gardiner is ugly, but it’s useful, and maybe it’s even beautiful: think of the Jetsons-like experience it affords flying through the thicket of skyscrapers that embrace its length.

thestar.com
By SHAWN MICALLEF
April 22, 2017

On Monday evening as the Leafs were playing Game 3 of Round 1 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the drive by the ACC on the Gardiner was easy: everybody was inside that building or somewhere else watching the game. A few hundred metres west of the ice surface, the exit ramp to York, Bay and Yonge Sts. on the Gardiner had been closed since early that morning, and already a bulldozer had carved a gash through it, exposing rebar and rendering the ramp useless to cars.

Howls of anguish were heard as drivers headed for the Spadina and Jarvis ramps instead, backing them up more than they’re usually backed up, though during rush hours it’s hard to tell a normal backup from a bad backup. Like any moderately successful city in the world, Toronto has more automobile traffic than it can ever deal with and will forever be trying to find alternate solutions.

Drivers were angry (are they ever not?), but after the York ramp is demolished, a replacement ramp will be built that will have a new option to turn north onto Lower Simcoe St., and a widened Harbour St. will lead to York, Bay and Yonge Sts. So we are building an even better ramp, at least from a driving perspective.

The bulk of the old ramp led due east as it slanted toward the ground and, along with the Gardiner itself, created the thin wedge of land where the rather dramatic 10 York St. condo is nearing completion, a new glass flatiron building for the neighbourhood. Here, the so-called “Hot Wheels” York St. ramp spun off the main ramp, an apt and most romantic kind of description for the circular off-ramp that had a bit of elegance to it.

Watching cars crawling around it from a condo above or even from the awkward park that was in the middle of it was meditative, as if watching an animation of how modern cities work from some 1950s planning film. When it opened late in that decade, the ramp was part of an industrial waterfront landscape, but now it’s surrounded by many thousands of people living and working who will enjoy the new, proper park that will replace it.

As drivers get used to the closed York ramp and stop howling, keep in mind the transportation phenomenon known as “induced demand” or the “if you build it, they will come” rule of road planning. More lanes encourage more traffic. If there are fewer lanes, a certain number of people will figure out another way to get to where they’re going. As the York ramp is right by the recently polished gem of Union Station, perhaps some may opt for the many trains that come and go from there all day long.

Two weeks ago, the Ontario government announced a plan to widen the 401 from Milton to the Credit River in Mississauga, from the current six lanes to 10 to 12 lanes. How quickly will they fill up? Just watch. In Houston, the congested Katy Freeway was expanded to 23 lanes and in the brief years since, it filled up and commute times are actually worse.

In Atlanta, the inverse happened recently when a section of Interstate 85 collapsed in a spectacular fire last month. As every Snowbird knows, travelling the I-75 south to Florida, Atlanta is a city with intense traffic and congestion, and the I-85 was a key part of their network. Yet after the collapse, there was no traffic apocalypse, and it returned to a normal level.

Highways are politics though, and more lanes can mean more votes, even if the evidence doesn’t show we’ll be any better off for the money spent. The destruction of the York ramp and its rebuilding is a relatively quiet post-script to the politically bloody battle fought last year around the billion-dollar rebuild of the east Gardiner. As other big cities remove their post-war freeways, it’s almost as if Toronto has a fetish for them.

It’s fitting then that last October was the 20th anniversary of David Cronenberg’s Crash, a film entirely shot in Toronto, but based on J.G. Ballard’s dystopian 1973 book about the sexual fetish for cars and car crashes of a group of Londoners. The book and film explore the strange allure and eroticism of cars and freeways, extremely dangerous things that we continue to hold close as part of our modern identity.

Commenting on the book in 2014, Zadie Smith writes, “Like the characters in Crash, we are willing participants in what Ballard called ‘a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions’... In the case of the automobile, we have long been encouraged to believe there is a natural convergence between such irrational pairs as speed and self-esteem, or leather interiors and family happiness.”

The Gardiner is ugly, but it’s useful, and maybe it’s even beautiful: think of the Jetsons-like experience it affords flying through the thicket of skyscrapers that have embraced its length a half-century after it was built.

Controversial upon release, 20 years on, it’s worth revisiting Crash for a variety of reasons, including extensive near-vintage shots of the Gardiner, Lake Shore Blvd. and other roads and freeways around the city before the condo boom, but also perhaps for some insight into our relationship with the Gardiner itself.

This terrible, beautiful, ugly, sexy, everyday thing drops concrete onto us and is a routine platform for death and destruction, yet we’re willing to spend endless amounts of money to keep it up, and we willingly drive it.

Sounds like Ballard-style science fiction doesn’t it?