Billion Dollar Park
- Thread starter SkyRider
- Start date
The park would be modeled after Chicago's Millennium Park which is about 3 times larger than the proposed park in Toronto. It cost them $475 million.
"The final cost of $475 million was borne by Chicago taxpayers and private donors. The city paid $270 million; private donors paid the rest."
Apparently it's Chicago's 2nd largest tourist attraction.
Get wealthy Torontonians to pitch in for half the cost. We'll name the park's attractions after them.
If the Ford family were willing to donate we could put in a skateboard park for urban youth. Put in one of those half pipes and name it "Rob Ford's Pipe" and to deter any mischief it could have posted signs, "Warning: you are being video recorded".
You do understand that is walking distance to where new park is proposed right?
Good luck with that.
How do you propose to hold up the new Gardiner? You can't put columns between the tracks since the tracks are built as closely together so as to just avoid trains smashing into one another. There are 16 tracks coming out of Union Station. Each track is about 14 feet centre to centre. How are you proposing to span 16 x 14' = 224'
Check out the piers that support the Gardiner now. There are columns every 20 feet or so.
Never mind the billions of dollars (seriously) of buried railway signal infrastructure.
Cheaper to build a Gardiner Expressway tunnel under the lake.
The tracks can easily be adjusted to accommodate the supports, plus there a a huge number of design options to build the supports within the tracks, use steel instead of concrete etc etc. It would be a great option. What would be an even BETTER option is if they include an above ground east/west relief metro into the design...that would add MASSIVE value.
This is simply a vainglorious proposal from all the people in government that want to make a name for themselves.
The city of Toronto's basic infrastructure still needs billions of dollars of basic maintenence, upgrading and expansion. And a billion dollar park above railway tracks is even being discussed?
Go have a look at Canoe Landing, a large park right in CityPlace. Ghost Town.
Park use is oversold.
The city of Toronto's basic infrastructure still needs billions of dollars of basic maintenence, upgrading and expansion. And a billion dollar park above railway tracks is even being discussed?
Go have a look at Canoe Landing, a large park right in CityPlace. Ghost Town.
Park use is oversold.
Beaches in the harbour would be a bad choice, water isn't clean enough to swim.Gardiner is fugly.
It's a scar on the city.
This is what your waterfront should look like:
Wait, what?! Wish you'd told me and a few hundred friends about this! (and the City of Toronto, which monitors and posts the water quality at each beach)
Yonge and Bloor is 1 hour walking distance from Front and Spadina according to Google Maps. Not exactly close.
Tracks cannot be easily shifted. I don't know where you get that idea from.
1. There's not enough railway embankment.
2. Union Station isn't going anywhere.
3. You can't just turn a train on a dime. Curves are very wide and very long.
4. There is BILLIONS of dollars of railway control infrastructure buried under the surface (signals, switch controls, communication, monitoring, you name it. In fact, Metrolinx just poured 365 in signal infrastructure upgrades in the Union Station Corridor alone.
5. Steel columns need to be braced, or they become very very heavy.
6. Everything would need to be built on piles since the entire railway embankment is fill that was brought in the late 1920s and early 30's just after Union Station opened and they moved all the tracks northward from more or less where the Gardiner stands today to directly behind union station.
Cheaper and faster to replace the Gardiner with a tunnel under the lake.
Pretty much.
Any Big Dig in Toronto would cost more than the big dig in Boston. Just by virtue of the cost of unionized Canadian construction workers alone (the City of Toronto will only hire unionized contractors because they are in bed with the unions).
Personally, I'd rather see them spend money on building more subways in Toronto than EVER building a tunnel to replace the Gardiner. They would tear down the Gardiner and infill the land with more and more banal looking boxes (condos). I'd rather look at the Gardiner thanks.
Maybe if Trump is elected we can enact a special visa for Mexican workers who are willing to work for the Canadian minimum wage on temporary work permits.
I believe cheap Mexican labor has been a pillar of the American economy and is the primary reason why American businesses can keep costs low while paying their American citizen employees high wages.
It's the Mexicans involved in construction, agriculture, housecleaning, etc., that juice the American economy.
If the Americans want to lose their cheap labor advantage I think could provide an alternative.
No, it would be as simple as the City of Toronto closing down its "fair wage office" which mandates that contractors must be unionized to work for the city.
The province makes no such requirement, nor does Metrolinx, nor does the Federal Government. Only the City of Toronto and the City of Hamilton mandate that Contractors must be unionized.
Toll the Gardiner (it's limited entry/exit, the technology exists). Use the money for a downtown relief line.
