Gardiner early completion shows better is possible. Toronto residents can speak up about infrastructure projects.
A funny thing happened the other week as I was driving from the west end of Toronto back to the east end. I was on the Gardiner Expressway and looked down at my speedometer and was travelling at 85 km/hr.
The speed limit was 90 km/hr, so by legal standards I wasn’t really going that fast. But it was my first trip in many months that I’d gone that speed on the elevated portion of the notorious highway instead of slowly crawling along.
That was because the highway rehabilitation work that had seen parts of it closed had been wrapped up months ahead of schedule, allowing for the reopening of the lanes earlier than expected.
The closure of lanes of the Gardiner Expressway in both directions had been going on for a year and a half but had come to an end in the middle of October. Depending on the time of the day, this means that not only have average speeds gone up but our commutes have gone down by between 10 and 20 minutes in each direction.
The Gardiner lanes initially closed in March 2024 and were expected to be completed in April 2027. That’s three years. Not to create a whole new highway. Just to repair parts of an old one.
The trip became insufferable. Projections claimed the lane closures would only add a few extra minutes to a trip, but of course the real time was much worse than that.
The software company Geotab conducted a study that found the most congested sections of the Gardiner experienced an increased delay of 230% in 2025, while commute times along the entire expressway had doubled since construction began.
A key reason that the work finished ahead of schedule is that the provincial government contributed $73 million to fund quicker work that included 24/7 construction.
It’s welcome news that the project is finished early. The cost to our personal lives as well as the economy was excessive. It simply shouldn’t take three years to do basic reconstruction. If you look around the world, there are many examples of much more complicated infrastructure projects being completed in much shorter time spans.
What this shows us though is that better is possible when it comes to getting important infrastructure projects completed. We can and must demand better — because it can be done.
Toronto residents are sometimes too polite and complacent when it comes to demanding accountability from the public sector.
For example, the 13 years and counting that it’s taken to complete the Eglinton LRT is just unacceptable. Full stop. It shouldn’t be taking this long.
If we brought the same energy to all of our major public infrastructure projects that was brought to speeding up the Gardiner Expressway project, just think what we could accomplish to improve the liveability of our City?
Anthony Furey is a long-time newspaper columnist who ran for Mayor of Toronto in the 2023 election. Email him at anthony@furey.ca
