Where roads rule...and work

thestar.com
June 7, 2015
By Edward Keenan

Years of study - and even more years of debate - about the fate of the eastern Gardiner Expressway will end this week when city council decides what to do with the iconic piece of road at its meeting beginning June 10. As the arguments reach their climax, Edward Keenan looks at the options, the experience of other cities, and what either choice might mean for a new neighbourhood east of downtown.

As we discuss the Gardiner Expressway, especially as it relates to the redevelopment of the waterfront in Toronto, it seemed natural to take a trip to what may be the most celebrated waterfront in North America: Chicago. For over a century, the Windy City has been constructing parkland, cultural spaces and civic attractions on the shore of Lake Michigan, reserving acres and acres of land right in the downtown core for public space. Well, for public space and for cars.

That’s another thing that drew me to Chicago. I’d been to San Francisco to see the Embarcadero boulevard on the bay, where 25 years ago an elevated expressway came down, and studied other cities where urban highways were removed, leading to none of the expected traffic headaches and lots of revitalization.

But I was intrigued to notice that Chicago has an interstate expressway running right beside its lakefront for more than 25 kilometres through the city: U.S. Highway 41, locally known as Lake Shore Drive. About 225,000 commuters use the road every day (about 150,000 driving cars, 75,000 on buses). Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) has talked about the marketplaces beneath expressways in Rio de Janeiro and the art installations in Philadelphia and elsewhere that make highway and viaduct spaces more vibrant.

But I thought, surely if anyone could teach Toronto something about accommodating an expressway on the waterfront, it is this place.

Sure enough, when I arrived in The Loop - as Chicago’s downtown is called - just at the beginning of rush hour on a weekday morning in May and walked down into the famous waterfront parks, it was interesting to note the extent to which they are bisected and surrounded by high-traffic roads: six-lane Michigan Avenue on the west, bordering the skyscrapers, another six lanes of Columbus Drive through the middle, and the eight-lane Lake Shore Drive on the eastern edge near the lake.

One of the most striking elements of Millenium Park, a public space defined by breathtaking sculptures and architectural pieces, is Frank Gehry’s winding metal pedestrian bridge over Columbus Drive.

When I approach Lake Shore, I see it is indeed a busy road, but it isn’t exactly an argument that applies to keeping the Gardiner as-is (or the hybrid variation). Because through the central Loop district, the freeway becomes an eight-lane at-grade boulevard, with five stoplight intersections. Traffic slows down on Lake Shore through the downtown core (but wasn’t snarled at all when I was there) and speeds up on onto a highway again leaving it. It seems to work fine.

North and south of the Loop, however, Lake Shore is a more conventional highway. In some places such as on the south side, it at the same level as the surrounding city, with pedestrian overpasses and underpasses providing access to the lakefront, and to the well-used bike and pedestrian trail that runs parallel to the road for its entire length (20,000 cyclists a day ride alongside the lake).

In other places it’s elevated, or has multiple levels. It’s a two-tier road north of the Loop, in the area near the celebrated Navy Pier area. This is the district of the waterfront featuring a Ferris wheel that inspired Doug Ford’s Port Lands ambitions. Though Navy Pier is undergoing a $278-million redevelopment of its own, it is still a busy tourist and cultural district. And though there are many in Chicago who argue for converting this stretch of Lake Shore Drive into something more like a boulevard, lots of pedestrians and cyclists cross underneath on Illinois Street and Grand Avenue as it is. Indeed, the sidewalks and bike paths on Lower Lake Shore beneath the expressway, the area equivalent to our Lake Shore Bvd. under the Gardiner, are so busy one local politician at a press conference in 2014 compared cycling on them to playing bumper cars. Because of that, the city is in the process of constructing a “flyover” bridge to give people on bikes and on foot better access to the pier.

Other than some sculpted lighting installations, it’s a typically uninviting concrete underpass. Alongside building infrastructure for people not in cars (like bike trails and pedestrian bridges), the big lesson here in connecting the city to its waterfront despite the highway seems purely to be building right up to the edges of the road. Maybe that’s obvious. It’s an approach we’ve already see emerging in the past decade around the central portion of the Gardiner, where condos and businesses hug the edge of the road, making it less forbidding. As Tory told me, near downtown we’ve almost “buried the Gardiner” by building around it. And it’s an approach to elevated infrastructure you see elsewhere in Chicago.

In The Loop, steel platforms carry subway-style elevated trains (“the El”) directly above some main commercial streets. Down on the sidewalk, you see retail stores forming a proper high street, complete with people sipping coffee on patios, right in the shadow of the train tracks above.

Though there’s an example in downtown Chicago of how a highway can turn into an eight-lane boulevard and still function (albeit running parallel to other high-capacity roads), Chicago also demonstrates that a waterfront district like Navy Pier can thrive alongside an elevated expressway, and that if it wants to, a city can learn to build around overhead transportation infrastructure of all kinds, and thrive doing it.