With the Gardiner Expressway nearing the end of the road, Toronto’s future suddenly looks very different — and a whole lot more expensive.

Word from city hall is that the 50-year-old highway is crumbling so fast it won’t remain safe without immediate attention.

That’s expected to cost $505 million over the next decade.

Many Torontonians will be shocked, but they shouldn’t be. Since the Gardiner was constructed in the mid-1950s and ’60s, it has survived, like the rest of the civic infrastructure, on a bare minimum of maintenance.

Now those days are over and Toronto faces some tough choices. Even if the city decides to pay the half-billion-dollar repair bill, which we all know will be more, congestion while the work is done will be horrendous, perhaps ruinous.

Some will argue the time has come to tear the Gardiner down, which will also cost billions, last years and slow traffic to a crawl. Though it would be nice to think Toronto could see its way clear to removing the expressway once and for all, that’s unlikely. The benefits would be huge, but such a move requires time, money and leadership, rare in these parts.

But someone has to pay. Why not those who use the Gardiner? Whether we call it a toll or a congestion fee, road pricing is an idea whose time has most decidedly come.

Already we can hear the shouting and screaming. Get over it, Toronto. For decades, we’ve had it so easy we’ve learned to take it for granted. We even elected a mayor who declared the war on the car over just as it started in earnest.

Thanks to the Gardiner, however, Toronto finds itself on a crash course with a reality, one entirely its own making, that it has managed to avoid for decades. The transit decisions never made, the maintenance deferred and hard choices delayed; all these are now coming back to haunt the city.

The fact is we have passed on the options; public transportation can’t fill the gap left by a disabled Gardiner. Neither GO nor the TTC have kept up with demand. Through no fault of their own, they can barely maintain core service, let alone expand.

Toronto doesn’t even have the bicycle paths for the hardy few who might use them.

So where does that leave the city? Councillor Adam Vaughan suggests the Gardiner be sold. That idea has the advantage of leaving it up to the private sector to impose tolls. As users of Highway 407 are painfully aware, business is only too happy to part us from our money.

But before we start to feel too sorry for ourselves, let’s keep in mind that already much of the world pays as it goes. In New York, for instance, the fee to use the Lincoln Tunnel or the George Washington Bridge is $13 (U.S.). In London, the congestion fee is about $16.

Therein lies Toronto’s future.

Even then, dedicating Gardiner tolls to Gardiner maintenance means that money won’t go toward transit, which, of course, was the plan.

Any way you look at it, the next few years won’t be happy ones in Toronto, especially for those dependent on their cars.

In the meantime, prepare to hear from every architect and artist who ever went to sleep dreaming about turning the Gardiner into a hanging garden, a linear park, the world’s longest High Line, a bicycle super-path….

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These days, their ideas, as crazy as they always seemed, make more sense than ever.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

Worried or wondering what is next for the Gardiner Expressway? Come back to thestar.com Thursday at noon when the Star’s Robyn Doolittle will take your Gardiner questions followed by a live chat with public works chair and councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong.

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