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You're dodging the entire criticism of the Olympics, which is that the benefits AREN'T worth the waste. They may be to you, and whoop-de-do, but the entire critique of the Olympics is that they're not. So, no, it's not a matter of you 'prioritizing' Toronto and critics not 'prioritizing'...

To begin with, the post you were referring to by picard102 clearly stated "on the whole, the Olympics do not increase tourism long term," which is a fairly accurate summation of the state of academic research. Frankly most public policy is based on probabilistic assessment, so why insert...

Goddamn super bridges! Surely the Spadina Expressway of our generation.

It's kind of a right left issue, there just appears to be a bimodal distribution of opposition to the Olympics. My casual observation is that opposition is pretty strong on the right wing (Rob Ford, rah rah taxpayer money) and the left wing (Bread Not Circuses, the Paris Green Party opposes...

Well, if the Olympic forums are saying that...

You're assuming "prioritizing Toronto" necessarily means accepting large amounts of waste to get some indirect benefits. Many people clearly don't accept that view at all. Some people think that the benefits aren't worth the waste. It's a jump of logic to extend from that that they don't...

That's a bit trite. Everybody here cares about "a better urban Toronto." We like Apple Pie and motherhood too, shockingly! The point of departure isn't that you care about Toronto and anti-Olympic people don't, it's that there's a gap between people who think sporting mega events produce long...

The 2.4billion figure wasn't net at all. PWC simply added Olympic spending and construction and incremental tourism together. It was a study of Real GDP impact, so of course any spending would count. If Toronto spent 10 billion dollars building an elevator to nowhere, our GDP would go up by 10...

The CN Tower was built by a private company that quickly made up the costs. It may be hubristic, but at least it could justify itself economically. That'a a world apart from the ridiculous pageant of multi-billion dollar aquatics centers and velodromes that are inevitably abandoned post-games...

My point was that what we got (again, worth ~12billion dollars) was actually far more substantial than what was actually planned for the Olympics. The constant mantra that THE ONLY WAY TO GET THINGS DONE IN THIS CITY IS TO HOST THE OLYMPICS is just wrong. Look at the recent Scarborough by...

Cities aren't for people to live and work and play in, they're for pointless accretions of starchitect ego and elite hubris. I'm glad the Beijing school of Olympic construction is so in vogue here.

This logic doesn't make any sense: Toronto has a history of questionable spending decisions, therefore we should spend billions of dollars on a party. Most of the infrastructure connected to our 2008 Bid was built anyways, sans-Olympics. The only difference is that without the veneer of the...

No this isn't a good analogy at all. A more accurate analogy would be if a bunch of kids in a family all of a sudden went nuts on their parents' credit cards on Boxing Day. There is only one taxpayer in Canada. Maybe in the short-run a subnational jurisdiction can extract resources its residents...

I can't say that your opinion is wrong, but it does seem like you're out of synch with the majority of people who like app-hailing. To flip things around, why wait till you're on the street? With apps you can check from anywhere (i.e. in a house during winter) and, in real time, see your...

You can always cherry pick times when Uber's surge pricing kicks in. I just checked within 30mins of your post and was quoted $29-$38 to the airport, which is significantly less than a cab. Basically, the surge pricing is usually pretty transient and it's rare you'd have no choice but to...

Is this sarcasm? The Canada Line currently handles about 1/3rd of its maximum design capacity. It's fine. And as the name 'rapid transit' suggests, the real issue is speed, not capacity. Ridership on the Canada Line is well within its design capacity. That strikes me as more efficient than...

The whole 'transit-to-the-airport' thing really can become the great white whale of transit planning. As far as overall transit problems facing the GTA, transit to and from the airport is really pretty low on the list in terms of importance. That doesn't mean never invest in transit to Pearson...

Very true. Even in the US, the cities held up as champions of urban vitality (e.g. Seattle, Portland, San Fran, Minneapolis) never had the African American population and resulting issues around white-flight. Toronto's downtown also benefited from some seemingly random, or at least...

A public ROI formula should naturally be broader than a private one, and include numerous externalities, but most of that should be able to fit into common standard. If a project causes a new neighbourhood to sprout up from the ground that would be reflected in induced ridership. When you...

I don't think it would be possible to have a single set of criteria which perfectly captured and weighted all of the relevant costs and benefits, simply because it would be impossible to form a consensus as to what is a cost and a benefit. Common standards, even if imperfect, would still yield...