OT: today is the day

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 10/26/2010 05:00 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 04:43:36PM -0400, Thomas Milne wrote:
>> I am honestly mystified by the hatred of Miller in this city. No one
>> can ever tell me _why_ they hate him, I just get this 'well he's
>> really left wing'.
>>
>> Facts are simple. Miller moved this city forward with significant
>> investments in transit, saved Toronto billions of future dollars by
>> negotiating an end to the city workers banked holiday pay, and if
>> anyone would just take the time, rather than simply repeat the
>> nonsense from the pundits on the idiot box, they would see that Miller
>> has a pretty good vision for this city, and he has reasonable plans
>> for accomplishing this vision. Everything is right on the front page
>> of his website.
 >
> Well Miller decided a bridge to the island airport was a bad idea and
> claimed that getting elected meant the people supported his idea.

This was a success, though not in the way he or the NIMBY groups who 
opposed the bridge thought it would be. Porter Air built up a 
first-class airline on the island despite what a columnist characterized 
as "the world's most pointless ferry ride". We now have a viable option 
for short-hop flights to various destinations that we didn't have 
before. That's a good thing and we have David Miller to thank for it.

> Well I
> think he was just the least bad choice at the time and lots of people did
> not agree with his entire platform and highly disagreed with parts of it.
> Certainly a lot of his platform was popular and he got elected, but not
> all of it.
>
> As for transit, what has he really done?  Looks pretty much the same now
> as when he was originally elected.  Sure there is talks of extending
> the subway in a few places, sometime in the next decade.  I suppose
> the streetcars got some dedicated lanes in a few places, which is a
> good thing.

Having a "light rail" line that bisects streets destroys neighbourhoods. 
Spadina is now essentially a highway with a rail line through the middle 
with lots of ugly overhead wiring. Merchants along St. Clair Ave. W. 
fought hard against the same thing in their neighbourhood but lost. 
Arguably, you couldn't make Sheppard Ave. much uglier than it already is 
by doing the same but light rail lines do have their drawbacks, not that 
busses are a wonderful substitute. Look at the Scarborough LRT. It has 
to be replaced because politicians of the day made the expedient rather 
than the right choice. It has never worked reliably and now, they 
apparently can't get replacement cars. The right choice was and 
continues to be a subway. That was the original vision and hopefully, 
that will be implemented. It's amazing that Ford's plan of completing 
the Sheppard subway and replacement of the Scarborough LRT with a subway 
line is seen as "radical". That plan has been in existence for more than 
20 years but no one has had the political will or vision to implement 
it. It remains to be seen how successful Ford will be at it. It's insane 
that we're still arguing over something that should have been completed 
20 years ago.

Read <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Relief_Line> if you want to 
have a good laugh over the grandiose plans of 1985 for "Network 2011". 
None of it ever got implemented. You can bet expensive consultants were 
paid handsomely for all sorts of reports, models, etc. but it amounted 
to nothing.

We have 248 streetcars, most of which are apparently near the end of 
their service life as per WikiPedia 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Transit_Commission>. "Unique track 
gauge" alone sounds like it's just a recipe for overpaying. The best 
analogy I can think of is PCs vs. proprietary mini-computers and we know 
how that one turned out.

Having said that, I doubt Ford will be able to convince Council to get 
rid of streetcars so those who like streetcars don't have to worry about 
this issue, at least not until there is a viable replacement, which 
isn't going to happen anytime soon.

By the way, reading in the second WikiPedia article about the Queen and 
Eglinton subway lines that were started but never got completed is sad. 
Imagine how differently the city would have evolved had there been two 
more east/west lines.

> A lot of new busses get bought (paid for by other levels of
> government as far as I recall), including some very unreliable hybrid
> busses (It seems version 2 is working out a lot better than version 1
> of those though so perhaps they will turn out OK).
>
>> Oh, wait, I forgot, he's just a lying, leftie NDP elitist flunkie. Of
>> course everything a right wing retard who barely made it through high
>> school says is _much_ more trustworthy.

More people vote directly for the Mayor of Toronto than for any other 
politician in Canada, including our Premier and Prime Minister, both of 
whom are elected directly only by their respective parties and then by 
constituents in their respective ridings. Given that, Ford seems to have 
done rather well for "a right wing retard", which goes to show that 
success, or lack of thereof, in high school has little correlation to 
success later in life, assuming that he really did struggle to get 
through high school.

I recall a Princeton grad, no less, who authorized "wise guy" political 
ads during this mayoral campaign. It just goes to show that formal 
education and common sense aren't necessarily correlated either. (What 
in the world was he thinking anyway? What a stain on an otherwise 
reasonable campaign.)

>> I just don't understand why people see investment and development as
>> some kind of great evil. To me, Pantalone was the obvious choice.

To you and 95,481 other people, apparently. Unfortunately for Pantalone, 
289,832 people thought that Smitherman was a better choice, and 383,501 
people, almost one in two of those who voted, thought that Ford was the 
best choice. Every one of the 37 other candidates managed to garner some 
votes, including Gerald Derome, who came in last with 251 votes. Watch 
that guy - he has nowhere to go but up. :)

>> The
>> only one who wasn't repeating this myth that lower taxes are the
>> salvation of people everywhere.
>
> For people without much money, tax cuts don't help much.  They need
> public services like transit and such.  I don't personally need them,
> but I think they are a good idea, and I couldn't care less about tax cuts.
> My taxes are just fine the way they are.

Toronto has the highest level of business taxes in the GTA. That causes 
many businesses to move to Mississauga, Vaughan, or Markham, which all 
have substantially lower business taxes but higher residential property 
taxes. That contributes to urban sprawl, smog, reduced viability of 
public transit (you need higher densities for mass transit), and 
gridlock, all things that no matter whom you voted for, you would 
probably agree are undesirable things. Cutting business taxes would be a 
good start to making Toronto more competitive in the region. I don't 
want Toronto to be a bedroom community for the outlying regions. I want 
people to be able to live close to where they work and vice versa. Only 
then can we put a dent into the serious problems that we have with the 
unsustainable sprawl, traffic, and concomitant environmental impact.

> Just because I could afford to pay for things myself directly doesn't
> mean I don't think publicly funded services aren't a better idea.
> After all plenty of people can't afford to pay for it.

In 2006, the city allegedly overpaid by $100 million for new subway cars 
due to single-source contracts. That isn't exactly pocket change and 
that is just one of many things that Council spent money on. Who knows 
how they spent the other few billion? We already know that some 
councillors spent their office budgets stupidly while some councillors 
were promoting stupidities like $3.5 million flag poles. If the 
allegations of overpaying $100 million on the subway cars are true, and 
we'll never know because it already happened, that was $100 million that 
couldn't have been spent on something else, or $100 million too much 
that they took from taxpayers, who in turn couldn't have spent it on 
something else themselves. There is always an opportunity cost for such 
decisions, no matter how noble the motives may be. I've read irrelevant 
arguments of how buying from Bombardier, we were supporting a major 
employer in Thunder Bay. It isn't the job of the TTC or Toronto City 
Council to engage in economic development efforts beyond its borders.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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