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rfmcdonaldPhilip Preville, something of a contrarian, argues in Toronto Life that the desire to tear down the Gardiner Expressway relate less to facts and more to political prejudices.
Much more at the link.
Pity the 5,200 souls who drive the eastern stretch of the Gardiner during morning rush hour. They are getting a good whipping in the name of evidence-based policy. Nearly every argument in favour of the teardown points a finger at them. Architect Paul Raff, writing in the Toronto Star, claims that the issue of the Gardiner East’s future is one “of reality versus misinformation,” then cites the 5,200 drivers as an example of “reality.” These drivers are also getting a thorough public shaming of the kind only Twitter can deliver, the crime being their excessive hoarding of tax dollars for their aging infrastructure pet. (At least they each have 5,199 pairs of shoulders to lean upon, to help cope with the mortification.)
No one has taken these 5,200 drivers to greater task for their claim upon the public purse than councillor Josh Matlow, who, in an open statement to his constituents about his decision to support the teardown, explained that “the facts got in the way” of his feelings about the Gardiner. First among those facts: 5,200. Matlow then goes down the costing rabbit hole to demonstrate the burden all taxpayers will have to bear to keep 5,200 people arriving at work on time: by his reckoning, $6.43 per minute of delay for the next 30 years.
I’m not sure I can crank up the twisty elastics of suspense on this topic any further, so now is probably the time to let the propellers fly. It turns out the figure we’re all so fixated on—these 5,200 Gardiner East vehicles at rush hour—substantially underestimates the actual amount of traffic on the Gardiner East. As evidence goes, it’s almost completely unhelpful to the Gardiner debate.
When I inquired about the source of the number with Waterfront Toronto, I was told the 5,200 figure is actually an estimate of one average hour’s worth of vehicle traffic during the morning rush. The morning peak period is three hours long; a more realistic figure, then, would be 15,600. Moreover, it counts only westbound vehicles, since they are the ones most likely to experience delays on the way downtown. When I inquired about the total daily traffic volumes on the Gardiner in both directions, Waterfront Toronto pointed me to figure 3 on page 18 of this document. The Gardiner East carries about 115,000 cars per day. The graph clearly shows a three-hour morning peak period averaging roughly 8,000 vehicles per hour, for a total nearly five times the 5,200 figure everyone keeps citing.
To say nothing of the four-hour evening peak averaging 7,000 vehicles per hour. According to Waterfront Toronto spokesperson Andrew Hilton, the Gardiner East traffic studies modeled only the morning rush hour. The rationale was that, since the morning rush has higher vehicle counts, it is the one that will yield the worst-case scenarios for traffic delays. Given the lower intensity of afternoon peak travel, Hilton says that a useful rule of thumb would be to expect afternoon delays equal to 80 per cent of the morning delays. This logic doesn’t necessarily jibe with the lived experience of many motorists. The evening rush equals the morning rush plus the additional hordes who came into town between 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., which explains why its total volume is larger than the morning rush. But we don’t have any traffic-model projections for the afternoon eastbound delays, so we don’t even have an official number to quibble over.
Much more at the link.
