The viaduct plans.

Major Harris, Secretary of the Downtown Association, in a second letter to The Globe on the Toronto viaduct question, makes its clear that he advocates bridges, no as a second-best plan if the viaduct should prove beyond reach, but as a better means than a viaduct of joining the business centre to the new waterfront. Major Harris says that the people of East Orange, New Jersey, and of St Louis, Missouri, after looking into the respective merits of bridges and viaducts, declared for bridges. A St. Louis journalist, writing of conditions in Chicago, is reported as saying that grade separation there under the viaduct plan, by which the railway tracks are elevated and street traffic is carried on th ground level, "has filled the city with eyesores—unsightly holes in the street, and dark and damp tunnels for street traffic. Chicago speaks in a loud voice against track elevation as a method of eliminating railroad grade crossings. The tunnels have spoiled the appearance of scores of Chicago street, and have provided hiding places for hold-up men."

This is a very dreadful picture, put Major Harris ought to know that it has no relation to the situation on the central waterfront of Toronto. The bulk of the passenger traffic to and from the front, in winter as in summer, will pass through four subways, at York, Bay, Yonge and Church streets. The two easterly subways of these four will have only running tracks above them. At present it is expected that six tracks will carry the traffic across Yonge and Church. Even if there were eight tracks it would be sheer nonsense to speak of so short a subway, which could be lined with white tile and flooded with electric light, as an "unsightly hole in the street" or "a dark and damp tunnel," a lurking place for hold-up men.

The York and Bay street subways, the first 550 feet in length, the second 350 feet, may present greater problems, but should be no more difficult to drain than other subways of modern construction to be found in almost every important American city. Major Harris in laying stress upon the length and darkness of two subways, the longest of which is only 550 feet, seems to forget that in London, New York, Boston and other fairly progressive cities there are subways many miles in length, used for underground railway traffic, that are neither dark, damp, dirty nor dangerous. His argument against subways because of their length recoils on his own head, for if it is necessary to construct a subway span of 550 feet to clear the tracks in use immediately to the west of the new Union Station on York street, then a bridge at that point would have to provide a span of 550 feet, plus two approaches. It does not seem possible that the length of York street bridge, with approaches of an easy grade, would be less than 1,000 feet, or almost a fifth of a mile. Such a bridge would be a far more serious barrier between the downtown business quarter and the new waterfront area than a well-built and well-lighted subway little over half the length.

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