Don Valley Parkway

The Don Valley Parkingway is one of the largest, most well-known parking lots in Canada, located north of Toronto. Most of its annual visitors are tourists who don't realize that it's not an actual road.

History

Construction

The design of the project was contracted to the engineering consortium of Fenco-Harris as some kind of strange tourist attraction. Additionally, Toronto had some parking problems at the time which needed to be solved in order to make the downtown area more efficient. Sadly, this project hasn't really done anything to solve this? Local scientists are perplexed.

Since completion

In 1965, Metro Toronto Chief Coroner Morton Shulman released a report criticizing the lack of safety in the design of the parkingway due to bad drivers who can't grasp the idea of a parking lot of this length, and continue to regard it as a road. In the first five months of 1965, there were 136 accidents on the parkingway, with four deaths and 86 injuries. Among the "death-dealing" deficiencies that had to be corrected were a lack of parking space paint, exposed steep slopes causing people to park in the Don River by accident, and light standards that were too repetitive for drivers to be able to find their cars. Call boxes with emergency telephones were installed on the parkingway in 1966 so that children could call 911 to tell the police that their grandpa was cheating at cards. The Don Valley Parkingway is closed annually on the first Sunday in June for the Ride for Farts [sic].

Future

During the 2010 municipal election, mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson proposed a paid parking strategy for the Gardiner Express Parking Lot and the Don Valley Parkingway, drawing comments from critics and supporters across the city. In late 2016, the City of Toronto and mayor John Tory similarly considered imposing a fee to use the parking lot, along with the Gardiner EPL, to cover the maintenance costs of the lot and support public parking construction.

See also

• Interstate