Boy, time sure does melt away when you're writing a daily blog and trying to build buildings. It's hard to believe that it has already been 7-8 years since I was writing incessantly about the merits of Toronto removing the eastern portion of its elevated Gardiner Expressway.

For those of you who may not be familiar, Toronto has an elevated highway that runs along the waterfront. It is old. Pieces sometimes fall off. Lots of water will drip on you. And so remediation works are underway. Several years ago, there was also a great debate that took place in the city about what should happen with its eastern leg. I even spoke at a Jane's Walk where I was, for the most part, not very popular.

The two options under consideration ended up being: 1) remove it and replace it with a grand surface boulevard or 2) remove it and rebuild it with a slightly different alignment. This second option was dubbed the "hybrid" option, but that was mostly political speak so that it sounded like some sort of generous compromise. You can think of it as the more expensive rebuild option.

City Council voted on these two options as one would expect. Councillors in the core of the city did not want an elevated highway running through their neighorhoods, and the Councillors and people in the inner suburbs -- who might use it for commuting -- were by and large more accommodating. Apparently there are somewhere around 15,000 commuters who use it each rush hour.

But here's the thing.

This vote took place in June 2015 and the thing still hasn't yet been rebuilt. So maybe it's not too late! Maybe there's an opportunity to save a few hundred million dollars between us friends. Also, if anyone is interested, I'm still available for controversial Jane's Walk presentations. One new idea I have is an elevated highway that runs through the inner suburbs and connects the best weekend brunch spots.

Canada Day weekend was a lot of fun in Toronto. This city was alive and it felt like people had come far and wide to visit downtown. But it was a good reminder that even if all of our cars were electric and even if they were all able to drive themselves, we would still have this problem:

I was in an Uber on Saturday afternoon heading over to the west side of downtown and we had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and hop out in the middle of Bay Street. We thought about waiting for the Ontario Line to be ready, but that seemed a bit far out.

So we rented bikes instead and rode along the waterfront, which was a considerably better experience. But then we couldn't find any docks with available slots, so we had to ride up into Liberty Village, drop our bikes off there, and then walk back down to Ontario Place.

Of course, this was still the better option. I'm fairly certain that we'd still be in that Uber had we stuck it out. And maybe not finding a bike dock is just part of life in the big city on a beautiful long weekend in the summer.

Still, it was frustrating. So I'll use this opportunity to once again ask our city leaders to reconsider their ban on dockless electric scooters. Toronto clearly needs all the mobility support it can get.

This past weekend it was announced that ground has been broken (i.e. construction has started) on the new Ontario subway line that will connect Exhibition / Ontario Place to the Science Centre by way of the light purple line labeled "C" on the above map. (The other image is a rendering of the proposed Exhibition station.)

This transit line has gone through many permutations over the years and was previously called the Downtown Relief Line (but that was seen as too downtown-centric); the Yonge Relief Line (still too specific); the Relief Line (not Ontario-specific enough, I guess); and probably a bunch of other names corresponding to various lines on a map.

So it is exceedingly easy to be cynical when you hear of an announcement like this. Is it really happening? Are we actually building new and much-needed transit? And as you might imagine, if you read through the chatter on Twitter, you will find an overabundance of this sort of cynicism, along with what appears to be a general dissatisfaction with the current state of everything.

But in my simple view, I reckon that it is far better to be starting construction on an important new transit line than not starting construction on an important new transit line. So this is exciting! Let's go! If you'd like to learn more, I also tweeted out the initial renderings for the 14 stations that are planned for the Ontario Line.

Images: Province of Ontario