Its an awesome idea!!!
I'll personally drive that hovercraft all the way to the Sundowner :rockon:
Ferry service proposed between Humber Bay Shores and Yonge Street
- Thread starter canada-man
- Start date
I'll personally drive that hovercraft all the way to the Sundowner :rockon:
"The island can be accessed by public transit, by car, by bicycle or by foot. The Concordia Bridge links St. Helen's Island to Montreal's Cité du Havre neighbourhood on the Island of Montreal as well as Notre Dame Island (which itself is connected to Saint-Lambert on the south shore by bicycle paths). The island is also accessible via the Jacques Cartier Bridge from both the Island of Montreal and Longueuil on the south shore. The Yellow Line of the Montreal Metro has a stop on St. Helen's Island: Jean-Drapeau station."
When I lived in Montreal, St. Helen's island was and is very accessible. Maybe Toronto Island(s) and St. Helen's Island are not comparable? No, St. Helen's probably doesn't have an airport.
Update: Ok, I refreshed my memory. St. Helen's sit between Montreal and the South Shore whereas Toronto Island(s) sit between Toronto and water.
When I lived in Montreal, St. Helen's island was and is very accessible. Maybe Toronto Island(s) and St. Helen's Island are not comparable? No, St. Helen's probably doesn't have an airport.
Update: Ok, I refreshed my memory. St. Helen's sit between Montreal and the South Shore whereas Toronto Island(s) sit between Toronto and water.
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The geography of the two areas are quite different. I don't know if St Helen's is affected by flooding, but it's less exposed like the Toronto Islands. Montreal chose to build various attractions on St Helens island, which makes the bridge and subway station worthwhile. These connections allow people to move between Montreal and Longueuil, which is a logical rationale for building them in the first place. These conditions don't exist on the Toronto Islands.
We certainly could build up the islands with housing or attractions that can operate year round like another museum, the Science Center, Ontario Place, aquarium, etc. but that's very unlikely to happen. A tunnel / bridge only makes sense if you have enough people living or visiting there.
For reference, that tunnel connecting the foot of Bathurst to Billy Bishop costed almost $100 million. So a pedestrian tunnel to the rest of the islands would be immensely expensive.
Montreal downtown does have the advantage it is fed from both the north, west, east and from the South Shore with St. Helen's in the middle. Toronto downtown is fed from only 3 directions and not 4. There's no civilization south of Toronto Island(s) until New York State.
Too late.
Metrolinx has already struck a deal to demolish Mimico station and let a developer build a new go station on that same site with a condo on top of it.
Seriously.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/metrolinx-mimico-development-1.4877720
Why not a rail tunnel? The distance is similar to the English Channel tunnel, and the travel time is 35 minutes. How much would Niagara commuters pay to carve an hour off of their commute downtown?
Add a train trip south 30 minutes after a Leafs/Raptors/Jays game, and it becomes a viable, almost attractive option to driving.
I'm afraid you are probably right. To offset the cost of a chunnel you'd need to charge about $50 toll or so, and very few people would pay that twice a day to go back and forth to Toronto every day.
A floating bridge would cost between $5 and $10 billion, which would put the price of toll around $5 to $10 or so.
That might be worth it. Agree or disagree??
A floating bridge would be cool, but I wonder how many lanes it would need to be to not keep idle. I guess you eliminate most of the traffic from the GTA.
It would have to be 4 lanes total (plus 2 emergency shoulders).
Currently many people commute from DT Toronto to Mississauga and Oakville, if you build a bridge to Niagara, and going over the bridge gets you to Niagara in 45 minutes you open up the entire Niagara region (and Haldimand county) as a new type of Toronto suburb. Right now its mostly farmland there, so it would have to go slowly (not every farmer will want to sell right away). The area has tons of space, you could easily turn it into another Mississauga/Brampton/Oakville.
See map:
Here's a floating bridge that also happens to be the world's longest at about 2KM and costed almost 5 billion USD. https://www.enr.com/articles/44013-the-10-longest-floating-bridges-in-the-world The water depth on that body of water is only about 60 M.
Contrast that with Lake Ontario with a depth that can go past 200M. Building a 50KM float bridge would be ludicrously expensive. Tolls would also have to be ludicrously expensive or lots of traffic to pay off the construction cost. There's still several problems like where to build such a structure. We'd minimally need a tunnel to get past the islands. Then you'd need multiple draw bridge sections to allow for cargo and pleasure boat traffic.
To put things into perspective, the 50KM bridge / tunnel linking Hong Kong to Macau costed almost $19 billion USD or $25 billion CAD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong–Zhuhai–Macau_Bridge
That kind of money would be better spent improving the existing GO and TTC to make them much more reliable and frequent.
Norway is working on something called a "floating tunnel". Its much cheaper than the English Chunnel, and you can build it in very steep water because its held together through suspension cables. Read: https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/world-s-first-floating-tunnel-proposed-norway-ncna971581
A $40-billion infrastructure project being planned by the Norwegian government aims to replace the ferries with bridges, conventional tunnels and what could be the world’s first “floating tunnel.”
"it was at the time the most expensive construction project ever proposed. The cost finally amounted to £9 billion ($21 billion), well over its predicted budget" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel
Might want to re-check your math.
Even if we want to attempt such a project, it would be better to have high speed trains each carrying hundreds of people instead of private cars.
This kind of money buys a lot of surface and subway infrastructure and a whole lot of ferries.
No, that project is for all over Norway.
$40-billion is not just the budget for one bridge, its the budget for multiple bridges, tunnels and a “floating tunnel.”
How then is this floating tunnel much cheaper than the channel tunnel when your article does not even talk about that cost?
10 years from now? That's the case for many companies today. Many are going further than that by hiring independent contractors.
From what I've read constructing a chunnel underwater requires a lot of extra labour and time consumption just to dig the darn thing, and then on top of that you have to build the actual tunnel. Its also dangerous, 10 workers died making the chunnel.
A floating tunnel is much easier to build, you can construct the tubes beforehand and all you have to do is anchor them in place with suspension cables.
Anyways, its a moot point because this bridge will unfortunately never get built. Not enough traffic like other jcpro said
I would like to see a subway extension to Square One. Not in my lifetime and I'm not that old, yet. Bloor line should be extended into Oakville and Yonge line to Barrie. Not to mention the Ajax/Oshawa corridor and Scarborough. None of these necessary infrastructure projects will be built before the current century is out. Not in this city. So, a bridge into the wine country is as likely as Toronto building a space shuttle. Anything to loosen the QEW would be an improvement. Unfortunately, more frequent GO trains is the best we can hope for.
