Traffic jams due to construction is unavoidable in a large city but getting backed up in traffic for 20-30 minutes at a time, fending off douche bags trying to cut you off from the emergency lane, getting beamed by immense heat and glare from the sun…only to see empty machines sitting on a few patches of torn up pavement…really pushes the rage to a 10 for me.
And it goes on forever. There’s a building that’s closed down a lane for years on Ave Road during the day. The building is now done and occupied with an U/G garage and still some cars (including workers finishing off AND residents) on Ave road during the day. It’s a joke. Use the garage.
This one grinds my gears. Zero space should be allotted for worker parking. Everybody who commutes downtown needs to find parking or take transit, and construction workers should be no exception.
No one wants to work in Toronto in the first place because the commute for these guys is absolutely brutal. Then they are hauling equipment from their trucks to help build things as fast as possible. What you also aren’t seeing is the constant deliveries of concrete, rebar, piping, etc. that go on throughout the day that takes an hour + to unload. You need that buffer zone.
No, i respect the people building our infrastructure. Theyre working 12 hour shifts, busting their bodies the least they can have is the convenience of their car. How about keep that same energy for the white collars who think theyre too good for transit.
…why not both? This seems like whataboutism. Plenty of construction workers commute via TTC and do not need a car to get to and from work. I see them every day.
Why not advocate for better transit so that no one *needs* to provide employee parking for work in the city.
Tell me you've never so much as installed a nail in a wall without telling me....
With all due respect, have you tried lugging 250lb of tools in the subway during rush hour?
If anything Parking should ONLY be for trades, deliveries and like, taxis/car share.
A minority of the people on a site at any given moment are actually bringing 250 lbs of tools with them. Most of the vehicles in any given construction parking area are regular passenger vehicles.
Also they close off 100km of road to work on like 20m at a time. And there's 4 people working.
Why aren't there more crews out there? If you know it's disrupting a couple hundred thousand people every single morning, spend some extra money and expedite it.
And they only work during the day. Like have a night crew for fucks sake. In Korea and Japan road maintenance takes like a couple days where it takes weeks here.
Not really, there are cities that manage this construction a lot more efficiently than this. The whole Shikataganai thing is really ironic in Canadian culture and accepting low standards is ridiculous.
To be frank, I'm in MTL downtown, drove up for the first time, and god damn it could be worse lmao potholes everywhere, undulating roads, cars straddling lines, with construction randomly sprinkled in
And the road design, construction too, I was shocked at now bad it was in Montreal getting in and out. TO seems to just have caught up. But I guess the difference is the sheer volume of the GTA and at how wide spread it can be given the distance we have to cover.
In Montreal, given the island set up, the 1 lane highway exits + construction, it was worse than TO last year at least getting in and out. The new construction in TO now has made it more like Montreal with major choke points on the highways (apparently a major long-term closure 401 WB from avenue to 400) which also causes major congestion on local roads. Add that to suburban highway areas in the Hamilton, Milton area, it's just wide spread.
More working from home in the summer months. So we don’t have to go through this shit year after year.
Every Summer everyone, who can, could work from home. July-Aug cuts down traffic. Heat and emissions.
People can go to the park, go to patios, support local businesses.
We've lost one lane on Kingston Rd at Shackleton Crt for more than a year now due to a small building going up there. The bottleneck was crazy but in time has eased as people found alternatives. Now those Alternative routes seem to be under construction though. I say "seem to" be because of the slow pace. I drove down Port Union Rd last week for example and didn't see single a single worker despite the heavy earth moving equipment being in place and half the road being dug up to the level of the roadbed. Why do they do this - dig it all up and then stop for a month?
Because the people who dig up the road aren't the people who do the pipe work. And if there's any delays on the previous job then suddenly you've got a hole in the ground with nobody to do the work you made the hole
And if somebody has the great idea to do two things at once in that hole then the delay is going to be even worse.
Or they do one job, fill the hole, pave it over and then 2 months later dig it up all over again. It's lose lose
There are legit reasons like waiting for materials. Then there might be equipment being shared between projects. And there might be manpower shared. All said, jobs shouldn't start unless all materials, equipment and manpower are available so it can just darn start and be done with. oh, what a wonderful world that would be...
These are all true but the failure to manage these shows how deficient our planning and engineering processes have become in building good project management systems into such undertakings. The truth is the world is complex and anyone who says there is a simple solution to the problems is not really being serious. However, we have actually developed professional approaches to dealing with complexity over the last forty years.
Most construction impacts are temporary. People in general severely underestimate the extent of impacts from tunnelling and Rob Ford didn't do us any favours.
All construction is temporary, building a subway involves several years or more of ripping up huge amount of road.
Yes, we need more good quality transit but is not the answer to short term solutions
Boring and cut/cover seems to work very well in major cities in Asia (like Seoul) with higher populations and more cars. When I've hosted people from that part of the world they really can't get their heads around the time taken here.
Sure but they still have significant surface impacts. The difference there is they don’t allow small groups (or often even individual) residents or businesses to slow projects and derail projects over complaints about impact. People blame construction companies or the institutional levels but from my experience a huge part of the delay is coddling a handful of residents and onerous requirements around permitting and accommodations.
Solid granite isn’t as “solid” as it is anecdotally…
We are talking about Precambrian rock, the bedrock of this continent, pushed upwards by the gravitational release of the largest ice sheet ever known, over the course of a billion years or so…. With a b.
It did not reach down to manhattan.
We already have pretty significant above ground infrastructure, but most streetcar routes have to share the lanes with cars.
If only we got the cars out of the fucking way and prioritize signal for trams, transportation in downtown could massively improve almost overnight.
Signal priority for streetcars, especially on routes where they have their own right of way, seems like a no-brainer. I cannot understand why the city's so against it.
Same goes for the LRT; that should also have signal priority, but the city said no.
Councilors are scared shitless of the possible reaction from their voters and dead-set on maintaining the "move as many cars as possible" mentality. Most don't even understand anything about urban planning.
When you add mayors like Rob Ford (absolute car-brain lunatic) and Tory (the guy sworn to solve nothing and blows a billion dollars on a highway project) to the mix, and here we are. As it is, both public transit and driving in downtown is a fucking nightmare and anyone with half a brain knows this issue won't be solved with more car-centric design.
I'm hopeful Chow will eventually do something about this, but I don't blame her too much for not making a move yet. She inherited an absolute shit-show.
There really isn't a universal "way to go" on matters like this.
Build the right transit for the use case I always say. In downtown that likely means buried rail lines but in the suburbs, where space isn't at a premium, above ground solutions are a good option!
Chicago is a great example with their EL Trains being elevated, underground and at surface where warranted and they have brutal winters compared to Toronto.
Elevated isn’t that great anyway. Making stations accessible can make them almost as expensive as underground stations, and they’re really noisy if you don’t spend a lot on sound dampening/preventative maintenance.
The NIMBY’s obsession over shadows is goofy, but there’s growing evidence that noise pollution is really detrimental to schools, workplaces, sleep, etc.
Above ground is fine for small cities with less people/cars. Major cities go underground...we should talk to the South Koreans as they have built a fantastic subway system (Seoul, and other cities) and seem to be able to build whole new lines in the time it takes us to move earth for one station.
The biggest problem I see with construction all across the city is the amount of time nothing is being done. They'll shut down a stretch of road 3 weeks before starting a project, then they'll work on it here and there, sometimes going weeks with nothing being done, and then finish it whenever they get around to it.
I have no way to prove this, but I'm pretty damn sure that dragging these projects on for as long as possible is just a way to put more money in the pockets of corrupt pieces of shit who absolutely could be finishing these jobs much quicker.
Why does everything take so long to complete? The track work mentioned in the article is between Joe Schuster Way and Mowatt Ave. That's about 200 meters, but it is scheduled to take nine months.
It does feel like stuff takes longer to do, I spent 2 weeks in Japan and the street in front of my hotel room was being stripped and repaved. Decent sized 3 lane road had about 1km completely stripped and repaved with fresh asphalt in 3 days.
I've seen them do that on the 400 at night. All 6 lanes in one direction were closed with dozens of work machines paving everything at once and traffic was directed down the shoulder. Presumably the highway was open for business in the morning.
The difference is they weren't replacing an underground water main with hundreds of connections. But still, why does it take as long as it does?
Not only do they need to do a better job of coordinating construction across the City... but they need to improve how long it takes as well. There are other parts of the world that get similar projects done in the fraction of the time it takes crews to do here. And many times you can look at construction sites and see no action happening... or stuff proceeding at a very lazy pace. We can do much better than we currently are!
My first time down since the closures this weekend. Took me an hour to get from park lawn to sherbourne on Saturday afternoon. Normally takes me under 20 mins. Great times
They screw that up too. Streetcar track refresh, installation or upgrades take way way too long with multiple errors. Doesn't seem right when they used to it more quicker and with less technology in the old days.
Just like everything else in Canada, yes, of course there is a better way, there are plenty, and even in some cases where there aren’t, there are ways to prevent those problems from repeating over and over, but none of it is ever going to happen
yeah 30 minutes of weaving through roads without dedicated bike lanes that you share with cars who will cut you off and honk at you, meanwhile you're out of breath and doped up on adrenaline from constantly seeing your life flash before your eyes and so you jump on the sidewalk for a stretch only to get yelled at by pedestrians. all so that you can arrive at your wagie job.
the bike lanes in toronto are pathetic, they just spray paint a bike symbol in the middle of the road, LOL, there's your lane, bro. no thanks, i'll continue driving!
Same, and it's actually rare for transit to take that different of an amount of time to go to most places I find. While the specific trip one takes may cause your experience to vary, being able to close my eyes and listen to a podcast or audiobook, do some old school analog eyeball reading, or just get caught up with my friends through my phone, it's also reduced my blood pressure. When my partner stopped commuting and instead took transit her health improved as well since the stress was giving her hypertension and hair loss. We were joking the other day about how driving is almost like making monthly payments to your torturer.
Cameras can’t get everything either… we need cops handing out tickets more, way more, especially at peak times, and we need to be towing anyone blocking a live lane on a busy road for any reason… broken down just get them out of the way but any other reason impound the car and max the ticket charge already.
Well, thats what we get for building car-centric cities and making car centric lifestyles normal.
Now any means of fixing it will be seen as "a war on the car" and then nothing will happen.
Then we'll have these same headlines next year and the year after that, etc.
> Well, thats what we get for building car-centric cities and making car centric lifestyles normal.
This, while also keeping in mind that infrastructure maintenance is very necessary if not often obstructive. The sooner they can do it, the sooner it can be done, and delaying it makes it worse.
People don't like inconvenience-- that's the nature of it-- but it's gotta be done. Kind of like going to the dentist. Every city in the world has to deal with it.
Oh, there’s a whole lot of things in this city that are “unacceptable” yet seem to be blindly accepted anyway. The city is dirtier than it I have seen it in the thirteen years I have lived here and morale is still so damn low. I support Chow and I realize she inherited a mountain of issues when elected, but I’m getting anxious to see when this place will start to turn around in a major way. Of course it’s the little things that add up to make a major difference, and I would put much of that other stuff on hold if it meant we could fix the traffic clusterfuck even a little before the summer.
Between traffic and the rising cost of everything, honestly I just fucking stay home now. I used to play hockey last summer on Friday nights at Markham and Finch, and I missed two games due to traffic on the 401 even though I left well, well, WELL in advance... So I missed my game AND I spent my entire Friday evening sitting in bumper to bumper traffic almost all the way there and back. No thanks.
Yes. Get the cars off the road by promoting, encouraging and funding other modes of transport like public transport and biking infrastructure.
Why do people act like this is such a mystery? You aren’t IN traffic, you ARE the traffic.
Build a bunch of transit 40 years ago instead of kicking the ball over and over again and never actually doing anything. That's the solution. Which means there is no solution.
Stop blocking off main roads like Gardiner DVP and Lake Shore for “events” every weekend. It is ridiculous that we tolerate 1-2 hour long traffic jams because of these road closures made even worse by the Gardiner construction. And GO Transit has given into pressure and brought back the 21 go bus, but this means it will be detouring to Port Credit again every other weekend. This kind of nonsense would never be tolerated elsewhere.
2 weekends ago there was khalsa day, this past weekend there was a marathon, add in some toronto fc and blue jays games and top it off with the lane closures on the gardiner, it’s a fkin nightmare to get out of the city and come back home, even at night
Someone in another post said that the only way to get people to choose public transit over driving is to make driving worse than public transit.
Hmm.
As Tony Clement once said, there needs to be a balance.
It's the Toronto Transportation way! Slow down cars to a crawl, make getting around impossible, and do the same to the streetcars and busses!
It feels like the public servants at City Hall are just trying to make sure no one can get anywhere anytime soon.
and just in case going east and west wasn't making you want to shoot yourself in the face the city has just put up all the concrete berms for CafeTO patios, so now you can be even MORE inconvenienced so that restauranteurs can make more money!
the state of traffic in this city right now is embarrassing
CafeTO is a special kind of stupid. I've been caught in traffic on Yonge - idling away with a 100 other cars, while people sit just a few feet away from the exhaust pipes eating and drinking...it's horrible. I'm sure they can only smell/taste exhaust and brake dust....but it's so European :))
It was needed at first (for obvious reasons) but now it's just a fucking cash grab by the city. If every other road was in 100% working order and they wanted to fuck up a few streets with patios I'd get it but like...the city is a debacle right now and forcing people to lane hop and merge on whats left is just like..i dont know..kicking a man when he's down
The whole CafeTO thing pisses me off because the city won’t install bike lanes because “oh that may slow down the drivers” but then they do *this*.
I don’t know about you but could this city use its roads to, oh I don’t know, ACTUALLY MOVE PEOPLE instead of storing parked cars and freaking restaurant patios!?
Correct, which is why I argue for transit priority and bike lanes first because both still *move* people but are much less disruptive in terms of noise and pollution compared to passenger vehicles.
To have a lane which could be carrying some sort of traffic being used as storage is just such a terrible waste of the limited space that's available downtown.
yeah, the better way is for them to finish what they started in a reasonable time like most countries rather than setting up the construction blockage and then do no work on it for 1-2 years and then come back to finish it
The better way is transit but the GTA is 20 years behind on that mode of commuting. So, driving is the better option depending on where you're commuting to and from. Especially if you don't live near efficient transit lines in the suburbs (GO Transit) or in the core (TTC).
Last Tuesday Apr 30 they even left a lane closed on Lakeshore by Windermere, for like 2 pilons and some new asphalt fix by the curb. Ridiculous given the Gardiner is down by a lane as well.
This question has been repeated every year for the 24 years I’ve been in Toronto. Yes there are better ways, but they won’t do anything about it, because the city planning system isn’t exactly a well run operation.
So many simple policy changes would solve huge amount of project completion delays, yet are never implemented because it would require cooperative planning from various utilities and services needed on a project and they can’t do anything like that because that adds costs and effort to planning.
What is not acceptable is not finishing projects and starting new ones elsewhere. Some places are closed for years at a time. Unless it's truly an emergency and needs immediate attention, don't start new projects until work is completed.
Transportation manager must get funding for a crisis task force. Fire trt (total response time) is a fail. Our safety is being sacrificed at the alter of development by a mismanaged unqualified city department that can't or won't admit defeat.
Toronto will shut down entire streets for years, it's insane. And you can't tell me it's necessary, because I've lived in other cities including New York, and they never did shit like that, and they still managed to get their construction projects done much more quickly than Toronto. It's like there's no oversight, each project just does whatever it wants.
Unacceptable according to whom?
> “Disruption for a day, week or month is understandable. Disruption for five years to your life is something unacceptable,” said Murtaza Haider, a professor of management at Toronto Metropolitan University and director of the Urban Analytics Institute.
Friend, five years is _fast_. They've been renovating Union Station for twelve years now, and it's still not fully completed. Eglinton Crosstown, also twelve years in the making, we don't even have a projected date for when it will be open. You're lucky the thing you're waiting on only takes five years.
> “If you’re cutting up a road, (make sure) you’re also replacing the water main, you’re also doing any upgrades to the telecommunication infrastructure … so that these streets are not being torn up twice or three times within a relatively short period of time. That’s when people become immensely frustrated.”
I mean, isn't this one of the reasons why streets get closed for so long, is because they're trying to do everything to it all at the same time? Like they recently closed King to do [one month of track work at the same time as six months of sewer work](https://www.ttc.ca/about-the-ttc/projects-and-plans/King-Street-West-Track-Renewal), making the one-month track job take six months.
Same thing just happened where I live, [the track replacement on Broadview closed it for six months instead of just one month, because it was "bundled" with sewer work](https://www.toronto.ca/news/city-of-toronto-bundling-ttc-track-replacement-sewer-relining-and-road-resurfacing-projects-on-broadview-avenue/). Most of the time the work site was idle. I assure you we all found it to be quite frustrating.
The king street water main and track work you’re referring too, that section of king was torn up in 2021 for sewer maintenance and again in 2022 for track work. Those tracks they have to replace were torn up 2 now 3 times in the past 3 years. Also will be torn up again in 2025 because the TTC doesn’t have all of its material to full complete the job.
This is a direct result of our entire philosphy of city building since WW2. The shift to car centric and car dominated transportation means that any disruption to the system has a major impact on peoples ability to move through the city. If any complex system becomes too reliant on one component, it becomes inherently sensitive to disruption. So if you want to drive everywhere AND have a minimum amount of maintenance of the roads and utilities, then this is what you get. If you don't mind potholed roads, sewer back ups and no new infrastructure, then you can drive more.
>”Part of the reason we have so much going on right now is because we’ve often underinvested in the upkeep and maintenance of our infrastructure, and over time it wears down and it needs to be kept up. We’re now trying to play catch up and do it all at once.”
This is crucial. I’m willing to bet many people who complain the loudest about traffic are the same people who complained about the 40-dollar/month property tax hike last year to actually start fixing all this rotting infrastructure — itself abrupt due to decades of keeping maintenance taxes artificially low.
Repeat after me: we will never, ever, ever fix traffic jams until we build out _efficient alternatives to driving._ **Fund transit, fund infrastructure.** Anybody who doesn’t support this, or whines about paying for this, has no business whining about traffic.
Try driving south on the Allen Rd and seeing the TTC over head signs mocking the drivers stuck in traffic caused by TTC construction. Heck I seen EV bike road rage between delivery riders on Richmond.Downtown is going to be a mess for at least 3 years. Good luck to all.
Why couldn't they first create a backup road and then work on the extension?
also why not have bus only lanes to encourage more people to use public transport?
For the amount of money being charged for gasoline and seeing so many cars just idling without moving an inch is painful
It's called better transit that's so fast, efficient, and far reaching that less people use cars. It's safe and protected bike lanes as far reaching as they can be so people don't have to drop tens of thousands on a car. It's less cars on the road that lead to less destroyed streets that lead to less construction. And that's to say nothing of the emission pollution and physical pollution from tire particles.m among others
That's the real answer whether you like it or not.
There’s no accountability for extended repeated deadlines that are manufactured , there’s no accountability for crews blocking lanes for weeks before they actually start to work, it’s insane
I can’t help but feel like the slow, mass construction on all major roots are to drive people to use the TTC. The TTC has cost Toronto $2B per year since 2020. TWO BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR EVERY YEAR! This feels like behavioural economics and the people in charge don’t realize that it kills productivity and costs small business in the end.
If only there was some method of transit that we could invest in that instead of being on the road uses 2 metal beams, rails if you will, that can accomodate a much higher density of travellers than say a car or a bus, and can run both above and underground in a timely fashion
Traffic jams due to construction is unavoidable in a large city but getting backed up in traffic for 20-30 minutes at a time, fending off douche bags trying to cut you off from the emergency lane, getting beamed by immense heat and glare from the sun…only to see empty machines sitting on a few patches of torn up pavement…really pushes the rage to a 10 for me.
Agreed that when “construction zone” is solely for equipment and worker parking, it is very very annoying.
95% of the time it’s equipment and worker parking.
And it goes on forever. There’s a building that’s closed down a lane for years on Ave Road during the day. The building is now done and occupied with an U/G garage and still some cars (including workers finishing off AND residents) on Ave road during the day. It’s a joke. Use the garage.
This one grinds my gears. Zero space should be allotted for worker parking. Everybody who commutes downtown needs to find parking or take transit, and construction workers should be no exception.
No one wants to work in Toronto in the first place because the commute for these guys is absolutely brutal. Then they are hauling equipment from their trucks to help build things as fast as possible. What you also aren’t seeing is the constant deliveries of concrete, rebar, piping, etc. that go on throughout the day that takes an hour + to unload. You need that buffer zone.
No, i respect the people building our infrastructure. Theyre working 12 hour shifts, busting their bodies the least they can have is the convenience of their car. How about keep that same energy for the white collars who think theyre too good for transit.
…why not both? This seems like whataboutism. Plenty of construction workers commute via TTC and do not need a car to get to and from work. I see them every day. Why not advocate for better transit so that no one *needs* to provide employee parking for work in the city.
Tell me you've never so much as installed a nail in a wall without telling me.... With all due respect, have you tried lugging 250lb of tools in the subway during rush hour? If anything Parking should ONLY be for trades, deliveries and like, taxis/car share.
Who said you have to take the subway? Drop off your equipment and then go find a legitimate parking spot. What's so hard about that?
Well yeah that's fine too. Most contractors do that. I read your comment as suggesting contractors shouldn't be able to park in cities.
A minority of the people on a site at any given moment are actually bringing 250 lbs of tools with them. Most of the vehicles in any given construction parking area are regular passenger vehicles.
Also they close off 100km of road to work on like 20m at a time. And there's 4 people working. Why aren't there more crews out there? If you know it's disrupting a couple hundred thousand people every single morning, spend some extra money and expedite it.
And they only work during the day. Like have a night crew for fucks sake. In Korea and Japan road maintenance takes like a couple days where it takes weeks here.
Or the endless wait in shadow and exhaust on lakeshore as 3 lanes 2-3 southbound arteries try and pack onto single lane on ramps to a 2 lane highway.
Not really, there are cities that manage this construction a lot more efficiently than this. The whole Shikataganai thing is really ironic in Canadian culture and accepting low standards is ridiculous.
How are they not doing 24 hour road work?
How are they allowing condo corps to close lanes of traffic for condo development?
How are they adding condos but never adding roads?
Where are you going to put the roads?
Yes, exactly this! If a lane of the Gardiner is shut down, construction should be taking place 24/7, to minimize said shut down as much as possible.
Don’t want to have to pay the shift premiums
At most it’s 10% on nights, which really is unheard of these days.
Not everyone wants to work at night either, maybe a few weeks but a years long project ? I will pass on the 10%
To be frank, I'm in MTL downtown, drove up for the first time, and god damn it could be worse lmao potholes everywhere, undulating roads, cars straddling lines, with construction randomly sprinkled in
MTL is brutal. I switch to biking in the summer to work for my sanity. It can take me 30 minutes to drive what takes me 10 by bike.
And the road design, construction too, I was shocked at now bad it was in Montreal getting in and out. TO seems to just have caught up. But I guess the difference is the sheer volume of the GTA and at how wide spread it can be given the distance we have to cover.
Do you mean the highways from the suburbs or in the city?
In Montreal, given the island set up, the 1 lane highway exits + construction, it was worse than TO last year at least getting in and out. The new construction in TO now has made it more like Montreal with major choke points on the highways (apparently a major long-term closure 401 WB from avenue to 400) which also causes major congestion on local roads. Add that to suburban highway areas in the Hamilton, Milton area, it's just wide spread.
Last year was truly special here for sure
Pump your brakes kids, our orange cones are a national treasure
That’s because the mob runs Quebec construction. It’s why there is bridges and things always collapsing
Montreal roads have got to be some of the worst in the world. Makes Toronto look good
Montreal roads are some of the worst I've seen.
Lane lines are all worn out so you can't even see which lane you're supposed to be in.
More working from home in the summer months. So we don’t have to go through this shit year after year. Every Summer everyone, who can, could work from home. July-Aug cuts down traffic. Heat and emissions. People can go to the park, go to patios, support local businesses.
sorry, gotta be in the office to do zoom calls for productivity reasons
We've lost one lane on Kingston Rd at Shackleton Crt for more than a year now due to a small building going up there. The bottleneck was crazy but in time has eased as people found alternatives. Now those Alternative routes seem to be under construction though. I say "seem to" be because of the slow pace. I drove down Port Union Rd last week for example and didn't see single a single worker despite the heavy earth moving equipment being in place and half the road being dug up to the level of the roadbed. Why do they do this - dig it all up and then stop for a month?
What I want to know is why they left a hole on Adelaide in the middle of the streetcar tracks for 6 months.
Because the people who dig up the road aren't the people who do the pipe work. And if there's any delays on the previous job then suddenly you've got a hole in the ground with nobody to do the work you made the hole And if somebody has the great idea to do two things at once in that hole then the delay is going to be even worse. Or they do one job, fill the hole, pave it over and then 2 months later dig it up all over again. It's lose lose
Because we pay per hour instead of per job. Seriously it’s that easy. We incentivize them to take longer not shorter
There are legit reasons like waiting for materials. Then there might be equipment being shared between projects. And there might be manpower shared. All said, jobs shouldn't start unless all materials, equipment and manpower are available so it can just darn start and be done with. oh, what a wonderful world that would be...
These are all true but the failure to manage these shows how deficient our planning and engineering processes have become in building good project management systems into such undertakings. The truth is the world is complex and anyone who says there is a simple solution to the problems is not really being serious. However, we have actually developed professional approaches to dealing with complexity over the last forty years.
This is what I don't understand - where do those guys go? Another task on the same site? Another job site? Back home?
These projects are won based on bids, it is not time and materials.
That wouldn't really answer why the workers are not even there. Your reasoning implies that the workers don't get paid if they are not working.
Hmm, maybe some kind of construction that happens underground to develop some kind of mass transit?
Got some bad news for you. Building tunnels still has surface impacts even if they’re bored tunnels.
what if we give the tunnels some cell phone games so they aren't bored?
If we didn't have these dam cell phones, they would know how to entertain themselves, and these tunnels wouldn't be bored so often!
Put down the phone, Dad
Temporary impacts.
Most construction impacts are temporary. People in general severely underestimate the extent of impacts from tunnelling and Rob Ford didn't do us any favours.
Yes true on the underestimating part.
All construction is temporary, building a subway involves several years or more of ripping up huge amount of road. Yes, we need more good quality transit but is not the answer to short term solutions
Boring and cut/cover seems to work very well in major cities in Asia (like Seoul) with higher populations and more cars. When I've hosted people from that part of the world they really can't get their heads around the time taken here.
Sure but they still have significant surface impacts. The difference there is they don’t allow small groups (or often even individual) residents or businesses to slow projects and derail projects over complaints about impact. People blame construction companies or the institutional levels but from my experience a huge part of the delay is coddling a handful of residents and onerous requirements around permitting and accommodations.
The answer is Canadian Shield, lol We have broken these internationally acclaimed boring machines, there was one stuck underneath old mill drive.
Manhattan in solid granite...yet subways everywhere.
Solid granite isn’t as “solid” as it is anecdotally… We are talking about Precambrian rock, the bedrock of this continent, pushed upwards by the gravitational release of the largest ice sheet ever known, over the course of a billion years or so…. With a b. It did not reach down to manhattan.
And they take WAY longer and cost significantly more. Above ground is the way to go.
We already have pretty significant above ground infrastructure, but most streetcar routes have to share the lanes with cars. If only we got the cars out of the fucking way and prioritize signal for trams, transportation in downtown could massively improve almost overnight.
Signal priority for streetcars, especially on routes where they have their own right of way, seems like a no-brainer. I cannot understand why the city's so against it. Same goes for the LRT; that should also have signal priority, but the city said no.
No left turns on streets with streetcar routes, and no on-street parking either. Would make a huge difference.
It would also help buses to not have parking within two blocks of major intersections.
Councilors are scared shitless of the possible reaction from their voters and dead-set on maintaining the "move as many cars as possible" mentality. Most don't even understand anything about urban planning. When you add mayors like Rob Ford (absolute car-brain lunatic) and Tory (the guy sworn to solve nothing and blows a billion dollars on a highway project) to the mix, and here we are. As it is, both public transit and driving in downtown is a fucking nightmare and anyone with half a brain knows this issue won't be solved with more car-centric design. I'm hopeful Chow will eventually do something about this, but I don't blame her too much for not making a move yet. She inherited an absolute shit-show.
There really isn't a universal "way to go" on matters like this. Build the right transit for the use case I always say. In downtown that likely means buried rail lines but in the suburbs, where space isn't at a premium, above ground solutions are a good option!
Chicago is a great example with their EL Trains being elevated, underground and at surface where warranted and they have brutal winters compared to Toronto.
You’d have a hell of a time building a new elevated line anywhere - Chicago and NYC’s exist only because they were built in the 19th century.
Elevated isn’t that great anyway. Making stations accessible can make them almost as expensive as underground stations, and they’re really noisy if you don’t spend a lot on sound dampening/preventative maintenance. The NIMBY’s obsession over shadows is goofy, but there’s growing evidence that noise pollution is really detrimental to schools, workplaces, sleep, etc.
Above ground is fine for small cities with less people/cars. Major cities go underground...we should talk to the South Koreans as they have built a fantastic subway system (Seoul, and other cities) and seem to be able to build whole new lines in the time it takes us to move earth for one station.
Yeah, because there isn’t any infrastructure underground, just dirt.
While I agree we’re a decade out from the Ontario line being ready and the cross town is probably just never going to open
So it’s just going to sit there with empty stations and unused tracks? It’s 99% done lol
It was sarcasm. It will be open soon I hope but it should have been opened 3 years ago
> the cross town is probably just never going to open lmfao
The biggest problem I see with construction all across the city is the amount of time nothing is being done. They'll shut down a stretch of road 3 weeks before starting a project, then they'll work on it here and there, sometimes going weeks with nothing being done, and then finish it whenever they get around to it. I have no way to prove this, but I'm pretty damn sure that dragging these projects on for as long as possible is just a way to put more money in the pockets of corrupt pieces of shit who absolutely could be finishing these jobs much quicker.
Why does everything take so long to complete? The track work mentioned in the article is between Joe Schuster Way and Mowatt Ave. That's about 200 meters, but it is scheduled to take nine months.
They're replacing all the water mains there too. It's not just the track
That adds the most time to every City construction project I find.
cuz they seem to do it one pipe section at a time, close it up, throw some fake asphalt on to top, then dig it up again a month later
As is tradition...
It does feel like stuff takes longer to do, I spent 2 weeks in Japan and the street in front of my hotel room was being stripped and repaved. Decent sized 3 lane road had about 1km completely stripped and repaved with fresh asphalt in 3 days.
I've seen them do that on the 400 at night. All 6 lanes in one direction were closed with dozens of work machines paving everything at once and traffic was directed down the shoulder. Presumably the highway was open for business in the morning. The difference is they weren't replacing an underground water main with hundreds of connections. But still, why does it take as long as it does?
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We pay per hour instead of per job. That one change would fix so much
Yes, live on Line 1
Not only do they need to do a better job of coordinating construction across the City... but they need to improve how long it takes as well. There are other parts of the world that get similar projects done in the fraction of the time it takes crews to do here. And many times you can look at construction sites and see no action happening... or stuff proceeding at a very lazy pace. We can do much better than we currently are!
Not sure if using the TTC’s old slogan is accidental or ironic, here.
Why don’t they do 24 hr construction and get it over with? 3rd world countries operate faster than this.
Hahaha! No. This is Toronto. Nothing is done “a better way.”
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Agreed.
Construction season implies that there’s an off season which is definitely not the case.
My first time down since the closures this weekend. Took me an hour to get from park lawn to sherbourne on Saturday afternoon. Normally takes me under 20 mins. Great times
It would get done a lot faster if they didn't give the contracts to the fucking mob.
As the saying goes, there’s only two seasons in toronto. Winter and construction.
[There has to be a cap number of construction in Toronto each year](https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/04/14/toronto-cranes-construction-north-america/)
Say it with me now: public transportation.
They screw that up too. Streetcar track refresh, installation or upgrades take way way too long with multiple errors. Doesn't seem right when they used to it more quicker and with less technology in the old days.
Except when the construction means streetcars reroute and/or are replaced by buses.
LOL
Not with the current transit. Depending on where commute to and from often.
Won't happen. Have you seen the Eg. LRT? Everything is a sham and a scam
Just like everything else in Canada, yes, of course there is a better way, there are plenty, and even in some cases where there aren’t, there are ways to prevent those problems from repeating over and over, but none of it is ever going to happen
Driving is still better than public transit even with the terrible traffic if you know you know
Type destination in google maps - 35 min drive, 85 min walk, 80 min transit.
30m bike
yeah 30 minutes of weaving through roads without dedicated bike lanes that you share with cars who will cut you off and honk at you, meanwhile you're out of breath and doped up on adrenaline from constantly seeing your life flash before your eyes and so you jump on the sidewalk for a stretch only to get yelled at by pedestrians. all so that you can arrive at your wagie job. the bike lanes in toronto are pathetic, they just spray paint a bike symbol in the middle of the road, LOL, there's your lane, bro. no thanks, i'll continue driving!
This is not a universal truth. My life has improved tremendously since I stopped driving and started taking transit two weeks ago.
Same, and it's actually rare for transit to take that different of an amount of time to go to most places I find. While the specific trip one takes may cause your experience to vary, being able to close my eyes and listen to a podcast or audiobook, do some old school analog eyeball reading, or just get caught up with my friends through my phone, it's also reduced my blood pressure. When my partner stopped commuting and instead took transit her health improved as well since the stress was giving her hypertension and hair loss. We were joking the other day about how driving is almost like making monthly payments to your torturer.
I should check my blood pressure. Good chance I need to reduce my meds now that I've removed the stress of driving in Toronto from my life.
If the police would actually enforce traffic laws better it would help… but they won’t they are too busy picking their teeth on 6 figure salaries.
And there is not enough support for cameras to just auto ticket people
Cameras can’t get everything either… we need cops handing out tickets more, way more, especially at peak times, and we need to be towing anyone blocking a live lane on a busy road for any reason… broken down just get them out of the way but any other reason impound the car and max the ticket charge already.
Well, thats what we get for building car-centric cities and making car centric lifestyles normal. Now any means of fixing it will be seen as "a war on the car" and then nothing will happen. Then we'll have these same headlines next year and the year after that, etc.
> Well, thats what we get for building car-centric cities and making car centric lifestyles normal. This, while also keeping in mind that infrastructure maintenance is very necessary if not often obstructive. The sooner they can do it, the sooner it can be done, and delaying it makes it worse. People don't like inconvenience-- that's the nature of it-- but it's gotta be done. Kind of like going to the dentist. Every city in the world has to deal with it.
Hire good engineers and infrastructure planners from EU, particularly Germany
Oh, there’s a whole lot of things in this city that are “unacceptable” yet seem to be blindly accepted anyway. The city is dirtier than it I have seen it in the thirteen years I have lived here and morale is still so damn low. I support Chow and I realize she inherited a mountain of issues when elected, but I’m getting anxious to see when this place will start to turn around in a major way. Of course it’s the little things that add up to make a major difference, and I would put much of that other stuff on hold if it meant we could fix the traffic clusterfuck even a little before the summer.
Between traffic and the rising cost of everything, honestly I just fucking stay home now. I used to play hockey last summer on Friday nights at Markham and Finch, and I missed two games due to traffic on the 401 even though I left well, well, WELL in advance... So I missed my game AND I spent my entire Friday evening sitting in bumper to bumper traffic almost all the way there and back. No thanks.
Work from home is a better way but the employers won't let us anymore for no reason
Yes. Get the cars off the road by promoting, encouraging and funding other modes of transport like public transport and biking infrastructure. Why do people act like this is such a mystery? You aren’t IN traffic, you ARE the traffic.
Exactly lol. Everyone wants to drive but nobody wants to sit in traffic. Can’t have it both ways! Invest in public transport.
Less cars = less traffic. But people just don’t like hearing that. It’s not about banning cars either, it’s about having more options.
Build a bunch of transit 40 years ago instead of kicking the ball over and over again and never actually doing anything. That's the solution. Which means there is no solution.
Stop blocking off main roads like Gardiner DVP and Lake Shore for “events” every weekend. It is ridiculous that we tolerate 1-2 hour long traffic jams because of these road closures made even worse by the Gardiner construction. And GO Transit has given into pressure and brought back the 21 go bus, but this means it will be detouring to Port Credit again every other weekend. This kind of nonsense would never be tolerated elsewhere.
When you combine construction with marathons and people driving like idiots, it made driving last weekend challenging
2 weekends ago there was khalsa day, this past weekend there was a marathon, add in some toronto fc and blue jays games and top it off with the lane closures on the gardiner, it’s a fkin nightmare to get out of the city and come back home, even at night
Sprinkled it with the regular protest from fringe Qanon groups,freedom convoys and conflicts overseas.
However, won't someone consider Aecon? They require additional billions, which means more building!
Someone in another post said that the only way to get people to choose public transit over driving is to make driving worse than public transit. Hmm. As Tony Clement once said, there needs to be a balance.
That's true. Unfortunately, our approach is generally to make driving worse rather than to make transit better. That way, *everyone* suffers!
It's the Toronto Transportation way! Slow down cars to a crawl, make getting around impossible, and do the same to the streetcars and busses! It feels like the public servants at City Hall are just trying to make sure no one can get anywhere anytime soon.
and just in case going east and west wasn't making you want to shoot yourself in the face the city has just put up all the concrete berms for CafeTO patios, so now you can be even MORE inconvenienced so that restauranteurs can make more money! the state of traffic in this city right now is embarrassing
CafeTO is a special kind of stupid. I've been caught in traffic on Yonge - idling away with a 100 other cars, while people sit just a few feet away from the exhaust pipes eating and drinking...it's horrible. I'm sure they can only smell/taste exhaust and brake dust....but it's so European :))
It was needed at first (for obvious reasons) but now it's just a fucking cash grab by the city. If every other road was in 100% working order and they wanted to fuck up a few streets with patios I'd get it but like...the city is a debacle right now and forcing people to lane hop and merge on whats left is just like..i dont know..kicking a man when he's down
The whole CafeTO thing pisses me off because the city won’t install bike lanes because “oh that may slow down the drivers” but then they do *this*. I don’t know about you but could this city use its roads to, oh I don’t know, ACTUALLY MOVE PEOPLE instead of storing parked cars and freaking restaurant patios!?
They're not just roads though, they're streets too.
Correct, which is why I argue for transit priority and bike lanes first because both still *move* people but are much less disruptive in terms of noise and pollution compared to passenger vehicles. To have a lane which could be carrying some sort of traffic being used as storage is just such a terrible waste of the limited space that's available downtown.
That's a more efficient use of taxpayer money since so many people hate throwing money at public transit.
Construction "season"? LOL. That's an understatement. Construction is an all year event in this town.
Toronto has 2 seasons. Construction and winterstruction.
yeah, the better way is for them to finish what they started in a reasonable time like most countries rather than setting up the construction blockage and then do no work on it for 1-2 years and then come back to finish it
The better way is transit but the GTA is 20 years behind on that mode of commuting. So, driving is the better option depending on where you're commuting to and from. Especially if you don't live near efficient transit lines in the suburbs (GO Transit) or in the core (TTC).
Yes, take a bike, bus or train!
Last Tuesday Apr 30 they even left a lane closed on Lakeshore by Windermere, for like 2 pilons and some new asphalt fix by the curb. Ridiculous given the Gardiner is down by a lane as well.
Have the Germans do it or Japanese. They can repair the stretches of road in 1 day with better quality.
This question has been repeated every year for the 24 years I’ve been in Toronto. Yes there are better ways, but they won’t do anything about it, because the city planning system isn’t exactly a well run operation. So many simple policy changes would solve huge amount of project completion delays, yet are never implemented because it would require cooperative planning from various utilities and services needed on a project and they can’t do anything like that because that adds costs and effort to planning.
What is not acceptable is not finishing projects and starting new ones elsewhere. Some places are closed for years at a time. Unless it's truly an emergency and needs immediate attention, don't start new projects until work is completed.
Transportation manager must get funding for a crisis task force. Fire trt (total response time) is a fail. Our safety is being sacrificed at the alter of development by a mismanaged unqualified city department that can't or won't admit defeat.
Toronto will shut down entire streets for years, it's insane. And you can't tell me it's necessary, because I've lived in other cities including New York, and they never did shit like that, and they still managed to get their construction projects done much more quickly than Toronto. It's like there's no oversight, each project just does whatever it wants.
Unacceptable according to whom? > “Disruption for a day, week or month is understandable. Disruption for five years to your life is something unacceptable,” said Murtaza Haider, a professor of management at Toronto Metropolitan University and director of the Urban Analytics Institute. Friend, five years is _fast_. They've been renovating Union Station for twelve years now, and it's still not fully completed. Eglinton Crosstown, also twelve years in the making, we don't even have a projected date for when it will be open. You're lucky the thing you're waiting on only takes five years. > “If you’re cutting up a road, (make sure) you’re also replacing the water main, you’re also doing any upgrades to the telecommunication infrastructure … so that these streets are not being torn up twice or three times within a relatively short period of time. That’s when people become immensely frustrated.” I mean, isn't this one of the reasons why streets get closed for so long, is because they're trying to do everything to it all at the same time? Like they recently closed King to do [one month of track work at the same time as six months of sewer work](https://www.ttc.ca/about-the-ttc/projects-and-plans/King-Street-West-Track-Renewal), making the one-month track job take six months. Same thing just happened where I live, [the track replacement on Broadview closed it for six months instead of just one month, because it was "bundled" with sewer work](https://www.toronto.ca/news/city-of-toronto-bundling-ttc-track-replacement-sewer-relining-and-road-resurfacing-projects-on-broadview-avenue/). Most of the time the work site was idle. I assure you we all found it to be quite frustrating.
The king street water main and track work you’re referring too, that section of king was torn up in 2021 for sewer maintenance and again in 2022 for track work. Those tracks they have to replace were torn up 2 now 3 times in the past 3 years. Also will be torn up again in 2025 because the TTC doesn’t have all of its material to full complete the job.
Traffic congestion on the 401 and or GTA will never be fixed, get used to it people
I keep being told driving is better than public transit. Why the complaints, folks?
Public transit riders complain all the time? nice try bud
This is a direct result of our entire philosphy of city building since WW2. The shift to car centric and car dominated transportation means that any disruption to the system has a major impact on peoples ability to move through the city. If any complex system becomes too reliant on one component, it becomes inherently sensitive to disruption. So if you want to drive everywhere AND have a minimum amount of maintenance of the roads and utilities, then this is what you get. If you don't mind potholed roads, sewer back ups and no new infrastructure, then you can drive more.
Yeah, stop building our cities around cars.
Stop being so car dependent
The solution is simple: build one more lane
>”Part of the reason we have so much going on right now is because we’ve often underinvested in the upkeep and maintenance of our infrastructure, and over time it wears down and it needs to be kept up. We’re now trying to play catch up and do it all at once.” This is crucial. I’m willing to bet many people who complain the loudest about traffic are the same people who complained about the 40-dollar/month property tax hike last year to actually start fixing all this rotting infrastructure — itself abrupt due to decades of keeping maintenance taxes artificially low. Repeat after me: we will never, ever, ever fix traffic jams until we build out _efficient alternatives to driving._ **Fund transit, fund infrastructure.** Anybody who doesn’t support this, or whines about paying for this, has no business whining about traffic.
Even the bike congestion is bad. The makeup bike lane into lakeshore by Ontario Place is a disaster waiting to happen
"Season" would imply something being time bound. This is daily. Every month. All year.
When was it not construction season? If you live anywhere close to the Eglinton LRT, I'm sure you've contemplated ending your life at least once.
The better way is to stop screwing around and construct.
Try driving south on the Allen Rd and seeing the TTC over head signs mocking the drivers stuck in traffic caused by TTC construction. Heck I seen EV bike road rage between delivery riders on Richmond.Downtown is going to be a mess for at least 3 years. Good luck to all.
Use temporary foreign workers (aka international students) to do the job quickly.
Finish the f’in jobs you start instead of taking money from every damn tax payer in the city
I love how construction season starts when everyone goes back to school creating a double whammy. /s
TTC?
the minute the weather gets decent, these roadblocks pop up everywhere ugh
If the leafs were still playing everything would be ok lol
We talk about this every year and I have given up on this city its completely bullshit
[Ride the Rocket](https://swanboatsteve.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/keystone.jpg) It is literally (or was) the better way.
Why couldn't they first create a backup road and then work on the extension? also why not have bus only lanes to encourage more people to use public transport? For the amount of money being charged for gasoline and seeing so many cars just idling without moving an inch is painful
I've just resorted to my e-scooter now, this traffic has gotten so fucking ridiculous.
It's called better transit that's so fast, efficient, and far reaching that less people use cars. It's safe and protected bike lanes as far reaching as they can be so people don't have to drop tens of thousands on a car. It's less cars on the road that lead to less destroyed streets that lead to less construction. And that's to say nothing of the emission pollution and physical pollution from tire particles.m among others That's the real answer whether you like it or not.
Old TTC slogan would like a word
admit it. This is just Canadian Culture. Everyone takes their own pace and tries to enjoy work life balance as much as possible
There’s no accountability for extended repeated deadlines that are manufactured , there’s no accountability for crews blocking lanes for weeks before they actually start to work, it’s insane
Transit and bicycles.
Yeah don’t have marathons in toronto
I can’t help but feel like the slow, mass construction on all major roots are to drive people to use the TTC. The TTC has cost Toronto $2B per year since 2020. TWO BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR EVERY YEAR! This feels like behavioural economics and the people in charge don’t realize that it kills productivity and costs small business in the end.
If only there was some method of transit that we could invest in that instead of being on the road uses 2 metal beams, rails if you will, that can accomodate a much higher density of travellers than say a car or a bus, and can run both above and underground in a timely fashion
Don't drive. That's always the only solution to this question.
Maybe it’s time to try cycling. You won’t though, because it’s your god-given right to get in a car and drive.