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What part of my statement misinterpreted what you said? You said you couldn't understand why anyone could vote for Hudak/PCs. My point was that if you can't understand why someone would vote for any of the major parties, it probably says a lot more about you than it does about anything else.

Meh, if anyone can't understand why someone would vote for one of the major parties, it really says more about them than anything else.

I didn't vote for the PCs, but the point of view isn't exactly unreasonable. If you accept the premise that the Liberals are somewhere between venal and corrupt, you'd have good reason to be skeptical any of that would happen in the first place. We're not, in fact, very close at all to seeing...

Without trying to defend the current proposal, I'm skeptical of why City Planning should be given lead here. Based only on what's in that article, many of the justifications seem incredibly weak. For instance... That's just insane. Using transit as a development scheme has a proven track...

I agree with most of the article, but with some caveats. I don't think there's a particular need for successful transit systems to have a smart card fare system. A simple POP system based on normal tickets and periodic inspection would accomplish almost all the same goals at less cost (the...

Depends on how you think of "waste." If you mean process-waste, as in institutions which see spending diverted from their intended target (e.g. corruption or diversion or incompetence), then there's probably not a whole lot of it. Any politician would have a reasonably strong incentive to reduce...

1.) Niagra Falls isn't an "innovation cluster" like KW. What kind of right thinking government would possibly bother serving that? 2.) The Liberals are very weak in Hamilton and the Niagara Peninsula. What's the point of a political pet project that doesn't serve your ridings? As far as I can...

Going underground would be a very expensive alternative to surface solutions, and would provide surprisingly modest benefits. If we implemented a strong transit priority system long the route (which in all likelihood would need to effectively ban cars from King), we could probably get travel...

More core stations definitely seems like a good idea. Ideally, the line would have a station everywhere it could have a transfer to a streetcar route. As for a tunnel component, what would it add? Arguably it could save some congestion at Union, but that would be at the expense of having to...

Not that I agree with blanket Euro-envy, but those city's aren't good comparisons to Toronto. Dublin's significantly smaller than Toronto, as is Belgrade. Rome's a bit smaller. Last time I was in Belgrade, the buses had been donated by Japan... I mean, let's aim a little higher. rbt listed...

I don't know if it's the IOC; the actual 'Olympics' seem to be a sideshow to most discussions of hosting the Olympics. The loudest voices seem to be local "dream big" cabals of developers, tourism boards and aggrandizing politicians. The same people seem to support any quasi-event which they can...

Though, interestingly, Stephen Harper maintained by far the longest minority government in Canadian political history! Over 5 years in minority parliaments. So, who knows, maybe there's nothing inherently contradictory about 'neoconcersvatism' (whatever that means) and minority govt.

Yea, I mean, for what it's worth I wasn't trying to endorse Tory or his platform. This proposal is one component of one plank of his platform, albeit one I like. Like you say, the City could go about some small to medium sized projects on its own. Apparently Olivia Chow's bus plan is polling...

No, I think everyone has been very clear from the get-go that, if something like this ever happened, it would be QP driving. Even Tory is framing it as a Provincial project. Ideally all decisions would take place at one level of government, but that's just not where Toronto is at this point in...

rbt, I'll try to respond to each of your points (though in a different order), but I still fail to see how this is such a politically contentious issue. 4.) GO hates big projects: Certainly that's been the case before, but will it always be? Metrolinx is currently in charge of the ECLRT...

I'm not seeing what you think is so politically contentious about Tory's proposal from QP's point of view, and certainly don't see why you think it would need some kind of huge organizational switcheroo. Smart Track is definitely at the line-on-map stage, but so is everything else. ML and QP...

Just because it requires Provincial cooperation doesn't mean it's impossible for the Mayor to advocate for it... Look at the impact Rob Ford's election had on the Province's LRT plans. The Province has actually been remarkably sensitive to what the City asks for, considering that the Province...

Sure, that's great for Paris and London, but Toronto isn't Paris or London. The population densities are just on different scales. Central Paris is about the same area as the old city of Toronto, yet has nearly 3x the population. Much as we talk up downtown's 'shoulder areas,' wide swaths of...

How on earth would he get Metrolinx on board? At this point he's just a private citizen, so why would ML or QP bother to take a stance either way? It's an election, he's promising something if he's elected, which all the Provincial parties are doing as well. Depending on who wins the...

The TTC's Lakeshore RT involved substantial property expropriation, elevated sections and tunnelled sections. It basically assumed no coordination with ML and that it would just expropriate an entirely new corridor next to the existing, elevate where that wasn't feasible and tunnel where that...