Surely the late Frederick G. Gardiner, the mid-century Toronto politician known in his time as "Big Daddy," would be disappointed that his last name is now usually accompanied by an expletive to describe a traffic jam. Originally called the Lakeshore Expressway, the Gardiner was renamed in his honour.
Some honour.
Big Daddy's name will be taken in vain even more this month, as the rebuilding of the Jameson Avenue bridge forces the closing of one lane in each direction on a stretch of the western Gardiner until June 11.
The cause is a massive project to completely demolish and replace the structure, which is more than 40 years old. It's an important task on a stretch of road infamous for falling chunks of decaying concrete. But this doesn't mean drivers won't complain. "Obviously when you close lanes on a major expressway ... there is a significant impact," said Peter Noehammer, the city's director of transportation services, with the resigned tone of a man used to delivering bad news.
Closing one lane in each direction means a loss of at least 30 per cent of the road's capacity, a number that could actually be closer to 50 per cent, traffic engineers say, when you factor in the "friction" in traffic flow caused by lane changes, braking and rubber-necking. Add in a fresh accident or a stalled car and those effects are multiplied. Each lane, in rush hour, can normally carry about 2,000 cars an hour, meaning thousands of drivers will be looking for a detour, spilling onto already choked nearby streets, waving fists behind their fuzzy dice.
The Gardiner's closing kicks off what the city has warned will be a construction season unlike any in recent memory. In all, $205-million is being spent fixing roads and bridges - including an extra $60-million from the federal government in recession-fighting stimulus cash.
The city says it does what it can to keep traffic flowing. For example, much of the regular maintenance on the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway occurs all at once on spring weekend closings, in order to avoid dozens of annoying weekday closings. But there is no way around it: Drivers are going to have to do some waiting. But it doesn't have to be this way. Improvements to public transit may be slow in coming, but some traffic engineers say high-tech toys coming soon to a dashboard near you could hold much promise.
In the meantime, if you drive, make sure your car has air conditioning. This summer's Gardiner closing is only the first in a series. Work crews demolished half of the Jameson Avenue bridge last weekend, and are replacing it from scratch over the next few weeks. Come September, they will demolish the other half of the bridge, and close the same two lanes on the Gardiner once again.
Plus, the city plans similar treatment on two other nearby bridges that carry westbound Lake Shore Boulevard traffic over the Gardiner, beginning in August. (Three temporary detour lanes are being built.) Besides all the construction, the city is also warning drivers that various downtown streets could be clogged, or closed, during the G20 summit next month, when world leaders converge on the city and turn the core into cloistered politico pleasure zone.
Drivers stuck in the Gardiner's lakeside limbo may take heart from the concept that traffic engineer's call "user equilibrium." Severe congestion eventually forces some drivers to take other routes, clogging other roads but lessening the congestion at the original bottleneck.
In theory, that herd mentality should help, but civil engineering professor Eric Miller, the director of the University of Toronto Cities Centre, says in the case of the Gardiner, user equilibrium may not make much of a difference. There just aren't that many other routes to use, he adds, and the ones that exist are already clogged: "When you have an already quite congested system, with relatively few alternatives, there may be only so much adjustment you can do."
In addition to taking detours, some drivers will vary the time at which they travel. But this is also difficult in a city where rush-hour traffic has been spreading far outside its traditional schedule already, Prof. Miller said, with the phrase "rush hour" itself now an anachronism. And any drivers that do seek to take public transit instead will be greeted by an overcrowded GO or TTC system, he added.
The obvious alternative is Lake Shore Boulevard, which at least has a sophisticated computerized traffic signal system to help cope, called SCOOT (Split Cycle Offset Optimization Technique).
Unlike the traffic lights at most city intersections, SCOOT senses how many cars are coming from which direction and automatically adjusts the traffic-light timing, extending advanced greens to allow long queues to go though an intersection, for example. The system is meant to allow the Lake Shore to handle sudden increased traffic when the Gardiner is shut down, or when a Jays or Leafs game finishes.
While SCOOT clearly eases drivers' pain on Lake Shore, Mr. Noehammer admits that not even SCOOT can help if traffic is truly gridlocked. "When it really gets busy in both directions, it is really congested no matter what," Mr. Noehammer said.
The city also recommends the Queensway and Evans Avenue as alternative routes, but neither thoroughfare is on SCOOT. Instead they are on the city's relatively new-yet-retro-sounding Series 2000 system, which now controls most signalized intersections. The system can still react to unexpected changes in traffic flow, but not as nimbly SCOOT.
But mere traffic signals are just so 20th century. Many traffic engineers think the future will be an age of what they call "intelligent transportation systems," or ITS. Think of services like OnStar, GPS or Google Maps beamed into your car, and then injected with equal parts HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and R2-D2.
Those electronic message boards above our expressways that warn us about slowdowns are a kind of low-tech harbinger. The advice they dish out is a bit vague and often something you already know (eg. "Collectors slow"). The city's impressive new online map of road projects and current traffic conditions is also useful (http://map.toronto.ca/roadrestrictions/index.jsp) but is a mere shadow of what the future may hold. (It showed a red stripe on the westbound Gardiner near Jameson around midday yesterday, meant to denote "very heavy.")
Soon - the technology is here and starting to become available - a dashboard unit in your car will calculate alternative routes for you, figuring out based on real-time traffic-speed data how long your detours would take, comparing them to your expected travel time if you stayed on the Gardiner.
One potential problem with this kind of device, however, is that drivers told that one route is terrible will inevitably all select the most obvious alternative route - immediately jamming it with congestion.
The ultimate scenario for ITS, as envisioned by some traffic experts, would see human drivers take more of a back seat, figuratively speaking. Instead of you deciding which routes to take, a computer would make the call, in a way that is meant to optimize use of the entire road network.
For example, the computer might send two thirds of the usual volume to the Gardiner, because of the blocked lanes, and evenly divide the other third on various alternative routes. Of course, we might ignore the advice. Perhaps in some congested dystopian city of the future, however, the computer's traffic orders would be mandatory.
Some feel this wouldn't be so bad. Expressway lanes with fully automated cars driven by computers could carry three times as many - up to 6,000 an hour - says Professor Baher Abdulhai, the Canada Research Chair in intelligent transportation systems at the University of Toronto.
Cars driven with the precision of computers, and without the skittishness and irrationality of humans, can go faster, and much closer together - one metre between bumpers. (Although in the case of the Gardiner, the downtown road network would be unable to handle all of that new traffic.)
"It's coming," Prof. Abdulhai says, although he acknowledges it won't be reality any time soon. "There is a whole line of research in automated highway systems, where you sit down in the car and watch a movie and the car will drive itself."
He later called back to mention that he, too, was caught in the Gardiner bottleneck.
Jeff Gray