‘This was worse than I was expecting’: Gardiner construction snarls traffic on nearby routes

Milonas frequently drives his partner to work at Toronto’s Pearson airport. A journey that typically takes 22 minutes took more than an hour Monday, one day after the city shuttered two lanes on a busy stretch of the highway.

After a month of smaller, intermittent lane closures, as of Sunday, the Gardiner Expressway between Dufferin Street and Strachan Avenue has been reduced to just two lanes each way. The eastbound on-ramp near Jameson Avenue is now also closed. The $300-million construction project is the second phase of the city’s plan to rehabilitate the aging highway. 

The city said it has a plan to mitigate some of the inevitable frustration that the highway rehabilitation will cause — and some additional tools it can rollout as the situation develops. But the first month of the construction, which ramped up significantly over the weekend, already saw drivers fearing what could be in store over the next few years.

“There’s no alternate route,” Milonas said. The reduced capacity on the busy highway has made major downtown routes like Lake Shore Boulevard even more congested than before. 

The west end closures appear to be having spillover effects all the way to the east side of the city. On Tuesday around 5 p.m., westbound Gardiner traffic was backed up past the Don River.

“The problem is they decide to everything all at once,” Milonas added. The Gardiner work is compounded by a slew of other construction projects that are closing roads across the city, such as water main and streetcar track repairs on King Street West.

Toronto’s traffic ranks among the worst in the world. Flexible work arrangements and relentless construction since the pandemic mean rush hour is no longer confined to just a few hours per day, leaving drivers with few windows during which they can navigate the city freely. Weekends are also more congested than in 2019, according to data from Dutch tech company TomTom. 

Even before the major lane closures began Sunday, the Gardiner construction was already starting to wreak havoc on downtown. 

Urban planner Sean Galbraith was driving home from Niagara Saturday evening, and was instructed by his GPS to get off the Gardiner near the Humber River to avoid the west end closures. Driving on Lake Shore, it took him an hour to get from Humber River to near the Canadian National Exhibition — a distance of roughly 5 kilometres.

“It was chaos. It was just a parking lot,” Galbraith said. He had assumed the detour would mean he’d miss the worst of it, but the spillover traffic from the Gardiner clogged up the surrounding routes.

“We live in a big city and traffic is always going to be bad,” Galbraith said.

“This was worse than I was expecting.”

The city’s plan to manage the congestion caused by the Gardiner work includes diversions, traffic agents and signal timing adjustments, among other measures. As a result of changes to signal timing made last week, there were some improvements to eastbound traffic into downtown on Friday morning, the city said in an email.

Staff will keep monitoring traffic this week and add more measures as needed. Some options are adding a traffic agent and extending green light times, both on Lake Shore and to facilitate left eastbound turns onto the Gardiner, the city said. The city also urged drivers to leave extra time, or consider an alternate mode of travel.

Traffic agents at intersections along King Street have helped streetcars move three times as fast along the transit corridor.

The construction is expected to last until mid-2027, with a brief hiatus when the 2026 FIFA World Cup is in town.

The effects aren’t just limited to drivers. One TTC user lamented waiting more than an hour and a half for the 80 Queensway bus last week, according to a post on X — a delay the TTC blamed on Gardiner construction.

“This will continue to be an ongoing issue due to the overflow of traffic until the Gardiner Expressway construction is complete,” replied TTC customer service.

One saving grace may be the GO Transit service boost that will take effect at the end of the month. Galbraith said he hopes the increase, which will see more than 300 trips per week added to the Milton, Lakeshore West, Lakeshore East, Kitchener and Stouffville lines, may get more commuters out of their cars.