See how Toronto demolished and rebuilt a huge stretch of the Gardiner Expressway

The long-term rebuild of Toronto's Gardiner Expressway has faced its fair share of criticism for contributing to the city's traffic woes, but it's actually a heck of an impressive undertaking if you're able to look past the frustrating lane closures and incessant gridlock.

A new time-lapse video has condensed the frenzied construction for the first two sections of the Gardiner Expressway Strategic Rehabilitation Plan's latest phase, covering a stretch extending from Dufferin Street — a project the City recently announced would be completed far ahead of schedule.

The video from local photographer Kotsy covers construction on the stretch of highway just north of Exhibition Place from 2024 to 2025, shortened into a digestible 3.5-minute watch time.

Kotsy tells blogTO that the drone-captured views of the project were aligned using a couple of different methods. 

"The first captures (in the second half of the video) were done using save points, but I realized pretty quickly that they aren't as accurate as I needed for this."

"So I did the rest manually using reference points on the ground and in the distance (how objects in the foreground are placed in relation to the objects behind them). All the alignments were done in Photoshop. I can't imagine doing this without them."