Preville on Politics

Front Street explained

Posted on March 8, 2007 by Philip Preville

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Councillors Adam Vaughan (Ward 20 – Trinity Spadina) and Gord Perks (Ward 14 – Parkdale High Park) failed in their bid to kill the Front Street Extension, the most talked-about non-existent road in the city’s history, which would pave Front Street from Bathurst to Dufferin and link it to the Gardiner Expressway. Curiously, a final decision about Front Street has been put off until council can debate whether or not to tear down the Gardiner.

For those who are unclear about the relationship between the two, here’s your briefing note. Some seven years ago, around the time when Torontonians first began to truly let themselves dream about life without an elevated Gardiner, a transportation engineer who’d worked for the city explained it to me like so: Tearing down the Gardiner will reduce its capacity, he said, which was a problem, because it would limit the city’s potential growth, and could even cause it to shrink—if people can’t get downtown, employers will locate elsewhere. But the Front Street Extension would alleviate the problem, because it would give cars an additional place to exit the expressway and disperse into the city grid. Ergo: demolish Gardiner + extend Front Street = no net loss of capacity for cars entering the city.

But if you don’t tear down the expressway, the equation looks like this: Gardiner stays put + extend Front Street = an increase in capacity for cars entering the city, and a huge gift to car-commuters coming from points west. This debate about the Gardiner, whenever it happens, ought to be full of fireworks.

Image credit: www.toronto.ca

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Philip Preville

Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.


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