Dufferin bridge plan not in line with residents’ vision for streetscape

By Dennis Hanagan –

A proposal to raise the Dufferin Street bridge where it enters Exhibition Place will ruin a long-cherished view of Lake Ontario, the city’s public works and infrastructure committee heard on May 26.

The part of the bridge that crosses the railway tracks is 100 years old. It needs to be rebuilt—and when it is, city staff want to raise it one metre to meet the future clearance requirements of Metrolinx/GO Transit trains.

There’s more. Because two more tracks will be added, the span of the new bridge will have to be longer which means making it thicker which means “raising the roadway elevation further,” says a city staff report.

That’s where David White comes in. He says the bridge will have a hump in it, and that’ll ruin the view of the lake looking south on Dufferin. White’s a member of the Parkdale-High Park Residents Waterfront Group but addressed the committee as an individual.

“The reason you want to retain the same grade on Dufferin without a hump is that you want to have a good view of the lake down Dufferin, particularly if Dufferin is extended at some point in the future which is a proposal in Toronto’s Official Plan,” White said in an interview.

The view is important because “it tells people this city is on a lake… and that our history is bound up in the lake,” White said.

He sees the matter involving engineering in conflict with the city’s appearance.

“My concern here is, as so often in Toronto, we look for engineering solutions but we really don’t pay sufficient attention to urban design. Urban design seems to be always an afterthought.”

“It’s a problem Toronto has never come to grips with. We constantly set aside the livability of our city when we’re spending large sums of money on new projects,” says White.

“We’re not thinking about what the city looks like, and that’s a real problem.”

A preliminary construction cost for the bridge’s design —which includes structural work, raising the Dufferin Arch 2.5 metres, roadworks, and accommodating a water main — is about $17 million.