Commuters on one of the city’s most heavily travelled corridors can expect a traffic nightmare for a while, now that Metrolinx has begun work in earnest on the Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit line.

Daily lane restrictions on Eglinton Ave. E. between Leslie St. and Laird Dr. have already begun as crews clear utility lines and trees in an area on the south side of Eglinton to make way for a massive excavation shaft.

Parts for the next two tunnel-boring machines to work on digging underground parts of the line — nicknamed Don and Humber — will arrive this summer and be assembled in the shaft, before they start drilling the 3.25-kilometre section west to Yonge St.

Traffic around the excavation site will be reduced to one lane in each direction, a restriction expected to continue for two and a half years. The site will be used to store dirt from the tunnel until the earth is moved by truck.

“The reality is, building the Eglinton Crosstown in a heavily congested area is a challenge,” said Metrolinx spokesperson Jamie Robinson. “There will be significant impacts on traffic for an extended period of time.”

In a couple of weeks, traffic will also be tied up around Laird Dr. as Metrolinx begins building the below-ground walls that will form the ends of the subway station there. That work will continue for six to eight months.

And it will take two years to build an emergency exit for the line close to Leaside High School, which means more lane restrictions on the part of Eglinton Ave. E. near Hanna Rd.

More chaos will ensue when station head walls go in underground at Bayview Ave. and Mt. Pleasant.

During peak evening traffic, about 4,000 vehicles an hour pass through the intersection of Eglinton at Brentcliffe Rd., just east of Laird Rd., a volume much higher than the number of cars entering the Gardiner Expressway from Lake Shore Blvd. E. during morning rush hour.

Robinson says that if congestion becomes a significant challenge, the transit agency will work with the city to lift left-hand turn-lane restrictions.

Perhaps the real challenge will come when the tunnel machines reach the busy Yonge St. intersection in 2016.

Metrolinx will have to turn the road into an excavation site to extract the two machines, although Robinson says it will be a much smaller hole than the one near Leslie St.

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Two machines have been drilling since last June east from Black Creek Dr. to the Allen Expressway, where they will be extracted and then put back in the ground on the other side so they can finish tunneling the 6.25-kilometre leg of the LRT west of Yonge St.

By the time all four machines reach Yonge, enough dirt and muck will have been removed to fill the Air Canada Centre to the height of the CN Tower, says Robinson.

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