Two minutes added to the length of a downtown commute seems a small price to pay for a great city. It's a point Mayor David Miller repeatedly makes in pressing to demolish the Gardiner Expressway east of Jarvis St., a section that carries about 120,000 motorists a day.
The source of the two-minute miracle is a recent report from Waterfront Toronto, which concluded that a drive from Queen St. and Woodbine Ave. to King and Bay Sts. would take an extra 1.8 minutes with the Gardiner gone.
But how can experts be so precise about traffic flow years into the future? The short answer is that they can't.
"The accuracy of that is misleading," conceded Waterfront Toronto president John Campbell in a recent interview. The waterfront agency obtained its numbers by plugging 2006 data into a city traffic computer. That approach produces "a very broad-brush" estimate meant only to check for "showstopper" commuter snarls, Campbell said. If a lengthy delay had been found, the agency would not have approved a $10 million environmental assessment of the proposal.
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