today is the day

[Herb Richter]

Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> On 26 October 2010 10:43, Lennart Sorensen 
> <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org <mailto:lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>> 
> wrote:
>
>     On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:27:16PM -0400, William Park wrote:
>     > I live in Mississauga, and commute 100km per day.  So, I may be
>     biased,
>     > but I'm utterly opposed to Public Transit.  If city wants to assist
>     > people with transportation, then city can run "public car rental".
>
>     Well I will just consider you crazy.  Plenty of people are really
>     awful
>     drivers and should not be allowed to operate cars.  As for commuting
>     100km per day, that's silly too.  I think my 40km commute total
>     per day
>     is already too long.
>
>     Mississauga is also a seriously bad case of urban sprawl making any
>     decent transit system nearly impossible to implement.
>
>
>
> It can work for the various concentrations of housing that are going 
> up around a couple of the main shopping malls (ie, Square 1, Erin 
> Mills Town Centre and Meadowvale Town Centre).
>
> There are plans there for quite a few dedicated bus laneways -- 
> eventually becoming LRT rights-of-way -- in Peel and York Region that 
> are beyond Ford's ability to kill.

Over the past two or three years I have been involved with a (urban) 
revitalization study (Finch Warden area) with city planners, 
politicians, community members and a developer who sought to build 8 
condo towers of up to 38 stories high with 1400 households in the 
parking lot of Bridlewood Mall. 

One of the major areas we considered was transit and traffic.  It became 
very clear to me that planners are just plain doing it wrong - that 
increasing capacity is NOT the answer!  ...decreasing volume would be 
much more effective.  Much like the thinking 20 and 30 years ago with 
respect to garbage where it was just assumed that you could always 
increase capacity by building another landfill.  Transportation planners 
seem to have only one plan: to just add another lane for cars or buses 
or bikes.  At some point you can't - just like we now can't add garbage 
dumps and now have to "reduce, reuse and recycle".

In transportation terms this could be to reduce the number AND LENGTH of 
commutes.  I constantly argued that any re-development that would 
convert commercial property to "mixed-use" be required TO BE mixed use 
and that for every new household built, there be at least one new 
permanent job created on the site.  This would reduce or shorten many 
commutes.  Of course developers fight this kind of thinking because 
residential condos are much more lucrative than employment space.

And here is why I voted for Ford:  during the summer, with much urgency, 
the developer and the (city) planning department pushed through the 
study and a somewhat downsized (re-zoning) application with what appears 
to have been a lot of sleazy back room deals and mis-information.  They 
pulled out all the stops to get these though in the last session of that 
council.  It was clear to me that they did not want to face a new 
council and a new mayor like Ford. 

On another note; one question I often put to the intensification 
obsessed planners was "when is a city full?" ...when we are all standing 
shoulder to shoulder like in a Star Trek episode?  ...I never got an 
answer!  ...I think Ford did at one point wounder why we have to keep 
increasing the population in the city at increasing rates. 

I hope Ford will keep his promise to ask the common sense questions and 
to demand answers that make sense. 

Like maybe, "can't the city save a lot of money by running Linux on more 
of its computers?"

Toronto needs a *lot* of fresh new thinking.


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