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Great coloumn about this very topic! K la, take notes!
| quote: | February 4, 2005
Why most of us don't take the 'better way'
By JOHN DOWNING
Toronto muddles through rush-hour hell, an awful Catch-22 where the gridlock hasn't solidified so that more drivers are forced to transit, and transit isn't making enough so it can provide a speedier, efficient service that will wean motorists from their cars. So most of us drive.
Even building a baby extension of Front Street is screwed up. If a city can't build even such a puny bit without a delay of two decades and an explosion of costs, then we should be thankful the traffic isn't worse.
The political reality is that most of the road and transit workhorses that millions use daily would never exist if they had been proposed to this council. Can you imagine the Gardiner and Don Valley expressways being approved? Or Yonge St. being ripped up for a subway, and being paid for out of fares?
Improvements to "super roads" within the city, such as the 427 and 401, only happen because the roads already exist, and the Legislature, populated by MPPs who couldn't exist without cars, controls them.
Ironically, the exception, the cancellation of the Spadina expressway by Bill Davis, to prove he was decisive and also a green Tory, came despite approval of the city's main council.
Then councillors lost their nerve. Toronto never did get its Northwest Passage (remember when our history was filled with explorers trying to find one?) and movement in the city's northwest is still screwed up.
Helpful measures were perverted or killed. An expressway that would have fed Hwy. 400 south was downsized into Black Creek Drive, and a major western Eglinton transit line got skewered, done in by Mel Lastman's subway, the Sheppard mistake.
The year is young but history keeps repeating. Consider the Front St. extension, which started life around $100 million and then, because pols jammed even bike lanes into it, grew to $255 million.
There must be a plot to make it too expensive for council's tastes. After all, a year ago it was extended three blocks and went up $10 million in just four days without a public meeting. So anti-car councillors say that's too much for new ramps to the hated Gardiner.
I thought the sense in saving the Gardiner -- one of the world champs in vehicle movements -- had become obvious, but planners and contractors hungry for work are persistent. The latest scheme is to remove some ramps, making it easier to pass underneath but not to use.
Strange! Don't demolish the expressway but geld it. But then logic flies like a wounded bird for Gardiner haters because they can't overcome two truths -- surface roads created to carry its traffic would be much broader than the Gardiner, plus the Gardiner hasn't been the major obstacle to lake views for years.
Expressway endangered
But foes keep chipping away. The Gardiner fed to a Scarborough expressway, which was killed after the Spadina, and the old link has been demolished, so just watch them try to do that all the way east to Yonge.
The billion-dollar Sheppard goof burns again in my memory because of the TTC's latest improvement plan, switching from subways to buses and streetcars in their own lanes in 16 suburban areas. Ironically, all of that would cost less than that dumb subway line.
Busways may be our salvation, that is, if it means new buses in a protected lane. But already the sales drums have started for light rapid transit lines, even up in York Region, fancy bigger streetcars costing $25 million/km. And York University is being offered a busway from the end of Spadina, for maybe $30 million, but is holding out for a $1.5-billion subway.
When you consider history, lobbies should take what they can get. Improved bus service and a few road links may not sound impressive but are bargains by comparison to the dreaming.
At least some traffic would still be moving while academics and silly pols sniff at savings and pray for expensive gadgetry.
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| quote: | Originally posted by jester
Everything in this country is illegal. |
"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery…" Winston Churchill
"If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law" - Winston Churchill
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