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Burlington Bay & Garden City SkywaysAs always, these pages are best viewed with Netscape Navigator. AOL browsers may produce undesireable results. |
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Burlington Bay & Garden City SkywaysAs always, these pages are best viewed with Netscape Navigator. AOL browsers may produce undesireable results. |
These particular problems were resolved eventually by the widening of the Humber Bridge to six lanes, the construction of the Burlington Bay and the Garden City Skyways.
When construction was completed in 1958, the Burlington Bay Skyway and its approaches provided four-and-a-half miles of four-lane controlled access highway to replace the last remaining section of two-lane highway on the Queen Elizabeth Way between Toronto and Niagara Falls.
The longest bridge structure undertaken in Canada at that time, the original Skyway was 8,400 feet (2,560 m) in length, exclusive of approaches, and consisted of 75 spans resting on 76 piers.
When the Burlington Bay Skyway was opened in 1958, registration of motor vehicles in Ontario totalled two million. Fifteen years later the total was more than 3.5 million, and the projection was that registrations would pass the four-million mark by the end of 1980.
The original Skyway had been expected to handle a daily volume of something in excess of 50,000 vehicles. Volume had passed 60,000 by 1973 and continued to climb into the 1980s. The QEW/Skyway highway corridor had become a new traffic bottleneck because of its success.
Design and construction for the twinning of the Burlington Bay Skyway began in 1983 using innovative construction techniques on an accelerated schedule. In only two and a half years, construction was completed. The new $39.7 million James N. Allen, Burlington Bay Skyway was opened to traffic in October 1985.
The Garden City (Homer) Skyway
Erection of steel for the Garden City Skyway began January 1960, and in mid-July a 125-foot long welded plate girder was lifted into place. Weighing 18 tons, it was the first of a total of 20,000 tons of structural steel that went into the construction.
The total length of the skyway is 3.5 miles (5.6 km), with 1.5 miles (2.4 km) for the bridge proper and two miles (3.2 km) of approaches. The roadway is 80 feet wide and consists of two 40-foot sections which provide six traffic lanes, a six-foot median and two three-foot sidewalks.
The Garden City Skyway was opened to traffic on October 18, 1963, carrying the QEW over the Welland Canal at St. Catharines and, together with Highway 405, forging a high-speed, controlled-access link between the New York Thruway serving the eastern United States and the densely populated southern Ontario.
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