Allen Road
Based on Wikipedia: Allen Road
The Highway That Changed Everything by Not Being Built
In 1971, the Ontario Premier stood up and killed a highway. That single decision—to cancel the Spadina Expressway before it could slice through the heart of Toronto—would reshape how cities across North America thought about urban planning. It proved that citizens could stop a freeway. It proved that neighborhoods mattered more than traffic flow. And it left behind a strange, truncated stub of a road that remains one of the most peculiar pieces of infrastructure in Canada.
That stub is called Allen Road.
Today, Allen Road is a 7.3-kilometer route that connects essentially nothing to nothing. It starts at Eglinton Avenue, runs north past a subway line awkwardly sandwiched between its lanes, crosses Highway 401, and then just... stops. It becomes Dufferin Street. The grand vision of a freeway carrying suburban commuters directly into downtown Toronto died fifty years ago, but the road's remains sit there still, a monument to one of the most significant citizen revolts in Canadian history.
The Dream of the Freeway City
To understand Allen Road, you need to understand what North American cities believed about themselves in the 1950s.
The automobile was not just transportation. It was freedom, progress, modernity itself. Cities that embraced the car would thrive. Cities that didn't would wither. The future belonged to drivers, and the task of urban planners was to get out of their way.
This wasn't entirely wrong. Car ownership was exploding. Suburbs were sprawling outward from every major city. People genuinely needed ways to move between their new homes on the urban fringe and their jobs downtown. The question was how to accommodate them.
The answer, almost universally, was freeways. Los Angeles was building them. New York's Robert Moses was demolishing entire neighborhoods to ram expressways through the Bronx. The Interstate Highway System, launched in 1956, was the largest public works project in human history. If you wanted to be a modern city, you built freeways. It was that simple.
Toronto wanted to be modern.
Planning Toronto's Concrete Future
As early as 1943, Toronto's planners were sketching networks of superhighways. The war wasn't even over yet, but they could see what was coming. The farmland surrounding the city would soon be filled with houses. All those future residents would need to drive somewhere. Better to plan the routes now than scramble later.
By the early 1950s, Metropolitan Toronto—a newly created regional government that combined Toronto with its surrounding municipalities—had assembled an ambitious vision. An "expressway ring" would encircle downtown. Radial freeways would shoot out from the core like spokes on a wheel. The Gardiner Expressway would run along the lakeshore. The Don Valley Parkway would carve through the ravine system to the east. And the Spadina Expressway would provide the critical north-south artery on the west side.
The Spadina was perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle. It would connect the booming suburbs north of Highway 401 directly to downtown, funneling commuters through the Cedarvale and Nordheimer ravines and down Spadina Road. The route was elegant in its directness. It was also devastating in its implications.
The Yorkdale Ultimatum
Sometimes massive infrastructure projects get built because of mundane economic pressures rather than grand visions.
The Spadina Expressway became inevitable—or so it seemed—because of a shopping mall.
Yorkdale Shopping Centre was planned to be the largest enclosed shopping mall in the world when it opened. The developers, T. Eaton Company Limited, had chosen a site southwest of where the Spadina would cross Highway 401. The location only made sense if the expressway existed. Without it, who would drive to a mall in the middle of nowhere?
Eaton's delivered an ultimatum: approve the Spadina Expressway or we cancel the 42-million-dollar mall. In 1962 dollars, that was an almost unthinkable sum—equivalent to roughly 400 million dollars today. The threat worked. Metro Council formally approved the expressway project, and construction began.
The interchange at Highway 401 would be a marvel of engineering: a three-level turbine design featuring 26 bridges, the most complex highway interchange Canada had ever attempted. Meanwhile, Highway 401 itself was being widened from four lanes to twelve. Toronto was announcing its arrival as a city of the automobile.
The People Who Said No
Not everyone was celebrating.
The Cedarvale Ratepayers Association had been making noise since 1960, disrupting meetings of the Metro Toronto Roads Committee. Their park—Cedarvale Park, running through a scenic ravine—sat directly in the expressway's path. A representative from York Township, which would later become the Borough of York, put the stakes plainly: this was "the only park area west of Bathurst Street and north of St. Clair Avenue available to serve 100,000 citizens."
Metro Chairman Fred Gardiner, the driving force behind Toronto's expressway network, was unmoved. "I can't see how anyone would allow one of 13 municipalities to block an expressway," he said.
But the opposition was spreading.
Forest Hill Village, a wealthy enclave north of downtown, calculated that the expressway and its interchange at Eglinton Avenue would require demolishing 276 buildings and would bisect their community entirely. They proposed tunneling under their neighborhood instead. Gardiner, himself a former reeve of Forest Hill, acknowledged the harm but insisted there was no alternative route into the ravine.
Ratepayers associations across the city began coordinating their efforts, forming umbrella groups with bureaucratic names: the Coordinating Committee of Toronto Ratepayers Associations, the Metro Ratepayers Transportation Committee. University of Toronto professor James Acland pointed out an obvious flaw in the plan to run rapid transit alongside the expressway: "They won't persuade anyone to park his car and take rapid transit when there is a wonderful expressway inviting him to drive downtown."
S. A. Hudson of the Lawrence Heights Ratepayer Association did some arithmetic. The expressway would carry 10,000 vehicles into downtown during rush hour. Those cars would need to park somewhere. He calculated that parking alone would require 69 acres of land in the city core—roughly 28 hectares paved over for the convenience of suburban commuters.
A Movement Takes Shape
The opposition to the Spadina Expressway didn't emerge from nowhere. It was part of a larger awakening happening across North America in the 1960s.
Jane Jacobs had published "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961, arguing that the urban renewal projects of the era—which often involved demolishing "blighted" neighborhoods to make way for highways and housing projects—were destroying the organic vitality that made cities worth living in. Her ideas spread rapidly among educated urbanites who were beginning to question whether progress necessarily meant more concrete.
Jacobs herself would move to Toronto in 1968, fleeing the Vietnam War draft that threatened her sons. She immediately threw herself into the fight against the Spadina, joining a coalition that had grown from scattered ratepayers associations into a genuine social movement.
The group Stop Spadina Save Our City Coordinating Committee—usually shortened to SSSOCCC, which nobody could pronounce—brought together an unlikely alliance. There were wealthy homeowners from Forest Hill who didn't want their property values destroyed. There were young activists who saw the expressway as a symbol of everything wrong with top-down technocratic planning. There were environmentalists concerned about ravine destruction. There were urbanists who believed cities should be built for people, not cars.
Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist famous for coining the phrase "the medium is the message," lent his voice to the cause. So did the writer Margaret Atwood. The Spadina fight became fashionable.
The Compromise That Wasn't
By 1969, the northern section of the expressway was under construction. The elaborate interchange at Highway 401 was taking shape. The subway line had been built within the highway's median, an unusual design that meant the transit infrastructure was now physically tied to the road project.
But the section south of Lawrence Avenue remained in limbo. Metro Council had approved only the northern portion, and the provincial government—which would need to fund the rest—was growing nervous about the political backlash.
Various compromises were proposed. Perhaps the expressway could end at Eglinton instead of continuing to downtown? Perhaps it could be buried underground through the ravines? Perhaps Spadina Road south of Bloor Street could be widened to accommodate the traffic without building a true freeway?
None of these satisfied anyone. The opponents didn't want a slightly smaller expressway; they wanted no expressway. The proponents argued that an expressway ending at Eglinton would simply dump traffic onto city streets, making congestion worse rather than better. Both sides were probably right.
The Premier Steps In
By 1971, Premier William Davis faced a political problem that had no good solution.
Metro Toronto had formally approved extending the Spadina to Eglinton, but the provincial government would have to fund most of the construction. The opposition had become too vocal, too organized, too connected to ignore. Opinion polls showed Toronto residents evenly split on the project. Construction was already underway on the northern section, money already spent.
On June 3, 1971, Davis announced his decision. The province would not fund any extension of the Spadina Expressway south of the section already under construction.
"Cities were built for people and not cars. If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop."
It was one of the most quoted statements in Canadian urban planning history.
The Aftermath
The cancellation of the Spadina Expressway didn't just kill one highway. It killed the entire concept of urban expressways in Toronto.
The Crosstown Expressway, which would have run east-west across midtown, was cancelled. The Scarborough Expressway, which would have extended the Gardiner through the east end, was cancelled. The Richview Expressway, which would have carved through the western suburbs, was cancelled. Toronto's expressway ring would never be completed.
The subway line that had been built within the Spadina corridor continued operating, eventually becoming part of the Yonge-University line that still carries passengers today. The stations sit in the median of Allen Road, their bus terminals positioned awkwardly between the highway lanes—a physical reminder of the hybrid transit-expressway vision that was never fully realized.
In 1976, the expressway was extended south to Eglinton Avenue, ending at a pair of signalized intersections that dump traffic onto city streets. In 1982, it was extended north past Wilson Avenue to connect with Dufferin Street. These modest additions made the road marginally more useful without reviving the controversy.
The Road That Remains
Drive Allen Road today and you'll notice its strange proportions. It's overbuilt for its actual function—an eight-lane expressway at some points, with a speed limit of 80 kilometers per hour, carrying traffic that could probably be handled by a much smaller road. The elaborate ramps and interchanges were designed for traffic volumes that never materialized because the highway was never completed.
The median contains subway tracks rather than grass or concrete barriers. Glencairn station, Wilson station, and Yorkdale station all sit between the highway lanes, accessible via bridges from the parking areas on either side. It's a design you won't see anywhere else, born from a moment when planners genuinely believed that cars and transit could coexist in the same corridor.
At Eglinton Avenue, the road simply ends. The southbound lanes merge into a surface street. The northbound lanes begin at a traffic light. Fifty years of proposals to extend Allen Road south of this point—tunnels, surface roads, elevated highways—have all come to nothing. The ravines that would have been destroyed remain intact. The neighborhoods that would have been demolished remain standing.
What We Learned
The cancellation of the Spadina Expressway became a template.
In city after city, citizen groups fighting unwanted highways pointed to Toronto's example. If it could be stopped there, it could be stopped anywhere. Vancouver cancelled its freeway plans in the early 1970s. San Francisco had already torn down an elevated highway damaged by earthquake, choosing not to rebuild it. Portland would later follow the same path. The freeway revolt that began in scattered neighborhoods crystallized into a coherent movement.
Urban planners began to question assumptions that had seemed unassailable. Maybe cities weren't actually improved by making it easier to drive through them. Maybe the traffic problems that highways were supposed to solve were actually made worse by highways—a concept that would later be formalized as "induced demand." Maybe Jane Jacobs had been right all along about the organic complexity of cities.
None of this means the cancellation was universally beneficial. Toronto's transit system has struggled for decades to keep up with population growth. The city's traffic congestion is legendary. Some critics argue that completing the Spadina would have reduced emissions by allowing vehicles to travel at efficient highway speeds rather than idling in gridlock on surface streets. The counterfactual is impossible to prove.
A Monument to Possibility
Allen Road was named after William R. Allen, who served as Metro Toronto's chairman during the years when the expressway was being planned and built. It's an odd kind of memorial—a road named for the man who championed it, terminating at the point where his vision was defeated.
The road sits in its corridor, carrying modest traffic volumes between places that aren't quite important enough to justify the infrastructure connecting them. Yorkdale Shopping Centre thrives to the west, proving that the mall didn't actually need the full expressway to survive. Lawrence Heights, a public housing project along the route, has been undergoing redevelopment for years. Downsview Park and the airport occupy land that might have become something else if the highway had continued north to connect with a provincial route that was never built.
The story of Allen Road is ultimately a story about choices. A city chose one path—freeways, cars, suburban expansion—and then chose a different path before completing the journey. The incomplete highway is what remains: a reminder that the future is not inevitable, that citizens can redirect the course of their cities, and that the biggest decisions in urban planning are often the decisions not to build.
Every city has roads that go somewhere. Toronto has a road that goes nowhere in particular, and that nowhere is the point.