ehlow
Senior Member
Subways for all! Subways on every street! No tax increases or waiting in the cold for a bus!
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Finch West Line 6 LRT
- Thread starter W. K. Lis
- Start date
Subways for all! Subways on every street! No tax increases or waiting in the cold for a bus!
Adjei
Senior Member
Sad part is there are many across the city who will believe that.
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
Just do what I suggested in another thread:
Throw RoFo in a pit with a shovel and tell him to start digging. FREE SUBWAYZZZZ
TOareaFan
Superstar
The very moment he "won" the BD subway extension for Scarborough he announced that he was moving on to Sheppard East and Finch to make sure those were subways too.
Aside from the aspect of poor transit planning (IMO) the changing of the RT replacement from LRT to subway was just the first round in a multi-round fight. With he, and the Minister of Transportation, saying publicly that LRT represented a 2nd class transit solution, it is not hard to imagine that few people (and the politicians that represent them) will easily settle for LRT over subway now.
Ansem
Banned
seems that Finch West fate lies with who will be victorious in the next provincial election. Even Metrolinx get that. Why waste money to build a line that a OC government would cancel?
Dan416
Senior Member
I think LRT on Finch makes sense though. It's a new corridor, it's not an extension of an existing line.
TFC
Active Member
I really hope that the Finch LRT gets built.
I get a headache every time I think about how dumbed down transit planning has become, and how little the politicians know about transit. We're trusting people to make decisions about things they are unable to comprehend...
How does Zurich/Vancouver/Amsterdam/(insert city that isn't Toronto) get transit planning right?
I get a headache every time I think about how dumbed down transit planning has become, and how little the politicians know about transit. We're trusting people to make decisions about things they are unable to comprehend...
How does Zurich/Vancouver/Amsterdam/(insert city that isn't Toronto) get transit planning right?
ehlow
Senior Member
It's hilarious that Ford had almost nothing to do with the BD extension (aka "Scarborough subway"), yet he seems to have successfully taken credit for having "built a subway". It's also hilarious that he acts as if it's already open when it's 10 years away.
I was glad to hear that even he has given up on messing with Eglinton.
ehlow
Senior Member
During one of the meetings one councillor was baffled that the subway vehicle's top speed was 80km/h, but that the average speed was much less. He asked the TTC staff: "then why aren't they run faster?". They seem to believe that the speed of the vehicle was limited by the vehicles' top speed, and that's why "LRTs are slower", rather than factors like stop spacing, grade separation etc.
During the recent council meeting, one councillor didn't even know what the Relief Line was. They really don't know the basics of transit.
These are the people making decisions!
rbt
Senior Member
China elects engineers (really, most senior party members are engineers). Democracies tend to elect people with good personalities.
TFC
Active Member
This is right on. Here, people elect individuals who they'd be comfortable having a beer with. It worries me that a good portion of the voting public would rather have their drinking buddy/relatable neighbourhood Joe make billion dollar decisions about topics they have no knowledge on.
diminutive
Active Member
Well, the obvious point is that China doesn't "elect" anyone, in the democratic sense of that word.
Either way, though, the occupational makeup of legislators seems to represent dominant socio-political groups. Becoming a lawyer is hard, takes substantial financial resources and tends to select for high income individuals. Political science students are also by far the biggest pre-law major, so it's not necessarily surprising that lawyers are predisposed to politics.
China's engineer obsession most likely reflects the strong managerial role of the CCP, at least historically, throughout the economy as well as the emphasis that state's placed on state led industrial planning. Likewise, in Africa, former military officers are overrepresented in politics... Or in Japan I believe the civil service dominates.
Power groups are self selecting and self replicating. It's not that democracies "elect people with good personalities."
rbt
Senior Member
Not in a general election. Internal party politics at the grass-roots level are not dissimilar to how Canadians decide on who represents any given party in any given riding; party members take part, some with experience have more influence, but nearly anybody can become a party member.
For many regions in Canada, we're not much different. If you get Liberal nomination in Toronto Center then you win; or Conservative nomination in Calgary you win. The general election is a formality.
Those party candidate nominations are the important step.
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WislaHD
Superstar
The vehicle or technology used in a corridor doesn't matter for squat. They are just a means from getting from one destination to the other. What matters when deciding on a vehicle/technology to use on any given corridor is which vehicle/technology provides the most benefit for the least cost.
The LRT vs subway argument in this city is stupefying. The sooner we move past this 'subways are an upgrade to lrt' rhetoric, the better.
The LRT vs subway argument in this city is stupefying. The sooner we move past this 'subways are an upgrade to lrt' rhetoric, the better.
diminutive
Active Member
I think your equivocating between Chinese and Canadian electoral practices is quite wrong, but in any case it makes my point for me.
Chinese (or any country's) politicians aren't randomly selected from a socially representative slice of the population and then voted on by the same population. In China especially, they tend to self select from those with the most resources and the most access to power. Historically, that has favoured party members from the state's massive industrial planning apparatus and, by extension, engineers.
Likewise, the reason so many Western leaders originate from the legal profession is that tends to be where the richest, most capable and most politically oriented/politically connected members of society go. It's not that the general population likes lawyers, or that lawyers are more electable for most voters. Indeed, most political campaigns go to remarkable lengths to de-lawyer a candidate's image (how many times did Obama brag he was editor of the Harvard Law Review? Do the Clintons brag about going to Yale Law?)