OT: today is the day

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 01:05:44AM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 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.

And you don't think Porter would have done well if there was a bridge?
Your argument makes no sense.

> 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.

And if the car guys had their way spadina would have been an expressway
30 years ago.  Now that would almost certainly have destroyed the
neighbourhood.

If they really wanted replacement cars I am sure someone would build
them, but they might not be cheap because they wouldn't be reusing an
existing design.  The fact toronto's subway is completely nonstandard
makes them more expensive than they had to be.

> 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.

The only part of Toronto's system that uses a standard track gauge is
the LRT.  The subway and streetcars use the same gauge and nothing else
in the world uses it.

> 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.

I sure hope so.

> 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.

Well the queen subway was a streetcar based subway.  Could have been
nice given how awful service is on the queenline through downtown.

> 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.)
>
> 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. :)

Well I hope Ford manages to clean up city hall and get things to be
more efficient.  Unfortunately streetcars are more efficient than busses
and subways are stupidly expensive to build, so he doesn't seem to be
in complete agreement with himself on that.

> 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.

I am not sure there is room in Toronto for a lot of new businesses.
I also didn't know my property taxes in Markham were high, but I don't
know what people pay in Toronto.

As for Toronto being a bedroom community, don't worry.  It is much too
expensive to live in for that to happen.  Adding more business to Toronto
will do the reverse in fact and make traffic worse as all those people
out in mississauga and markham and such are commuting to jobs in Toronto.

> 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.

Oh having the city councel cleaned up would be great.  I recall the
computer contract scandel and there have been others.  Clearly the city
hasn't been run well in many cases.

Now can anyone prove that they did in fact overpay?  How much did other
places want to charge for subway cars for toronto's custom tracks?
A lot of places don't even want to touch toronto's system because it
doesn't really fit in their factories.  Bombardier knows the toronto
system and has made trains for it before.  They know when they are
getting into.  Often you end up going with a low bid and then end up
with cost overruns or things that don't work because they didn't really
know what they were getting into.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists