News   Jul 15, 2024
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Mayor John Tory's Toronto

I believe at the committee meeting Jaye Robinson also indicated that she was leaning towards the removal option.

She's actually leaning towards the hybrid option last I heard.

Public Works chair Jaye Robinson says she is "leaning towards" the hybrid option on the Gardiner but "the jury is still out"

This is something the public could probably sway enough councillors on if many rallied behind the remove option.

Tory still acts like he's scared of and influenced by Ford. He fears him coming back and swaying voters with his war on the car nonsense.
 
John Tory was on The Agenda last night and Paikin hit him pretty hard on carding, the Gardiner and Scarborough subway.

http://tvo.org/video/213420/john-tory-taking-toronto

I finally had a chance to watch this. Great interview. I really wish all our media organizations would be willing to ask the tough questions like this.

I don't agree with Tory on everything, especially on the Gardiner issue, but this guy is really a breath of fresh air compared to what we've had for the past four years. Low bar maybe, but this was actually an intelligent discourse.
 
I disagree with him on the Scarborough subway (despite living there), but it is still nice to have a real mayor for this city. It is no surprise that he has maintained a high approval rating.
 
ainslie and carroll are also boulevardians... i'm sure there are others

I've been attempting to keep track of the boulevardites based on what I happen to read on their twitter or in a news article. So far I have Mary McMahon, Perks, Carroll, Mihevic, Cressy, and Paul Ainslea. Meanwhile I haven't found many confirmed hybrid supporters, so for now all I have are DMW and mayor Tory. I excluded Ford since I (hopefully) don't expect him to be at the council meeting due to his recent cancer surgery.

I think we should compile a list of councillors and the side they are on.

Fun fact: Mammoliti, DMW, and Shiner voted in favour of demolishing the Scarborough expressway stub in 1999.


Jaye Robinson is actually leaning towards the hybrid option last I heard.

If she goes for the hybrid, I will still respect her opinion. I feel that she really looked at the facts and done her research. She also went on the Jane's Walk, attended the public consultation in April, and asked many good questions at the PWIC meeting. The same can't be said about many other councillors.
 
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I actually ended up watching a lot of that committee meeting in the background while doing other work.

Councilor Holiday seemed surprisingly open-minded towards the idea of demolishing, or at least concerned with the facts. An improvement over his father?
 
I actually ended up watching a lot of that committee meeting in the background while doing other work.

Councilor Holiday seemed surprisingly open-minded towards the idea of demolishing, or at least concerned with the facts. An improvement over his father?

Hopefully a sign of things to come. Thus far his voting record has been a carbon copy of his father's.
 
I disagree with him on the Scarborough subway (despite living there), but it is still nice to have a real mayor for this city. It is no surprise that he has maintained a high approval rating.

Tory is just a smoother Ford with better manners:
Scarborough subway? Check.
Hybrid Gardiner (i.e. rebuild it somewhere slightly different)? Check.
DRL? Not so much.
Anything that would slightly reduce our reliance on driving? No War On The Car on Tory's watch, folks.
 
Nothing would have happened with the DRL in this term with any mayor. The project is so many years in the future.

Check the Steve Paikin interview with John Tory. He says that the preliminary studies for the DRL are progressing with him in charge.

As for the Scarborough subway, he admitted that the subway is not the best solution but he is not going to re-open it for debate when 3 levels of government agree on a plan. His reasoning there I can at least respect even if I wish there was alternatives. (If he can somehow swap the subway for a spur of SmartTrack that reaches STC, that would be politically brilliant)

The "Hybrid" Gardiner is where I lose him.
 
Nothing would have happened with the DRL in this term with any mayor. The project is so many years in the future.

Check the Steve Paikin interview with John Tory. He says that the preliminary studies for the DRL are progressing with him in charge.

As for the Scarborough subway, he admitted that the subway is not the best solution but he is not going to re-open it for debate when 3 levels of government agree on a plan. His reasoning there I can at least respect even if I wish there was alternatives. (If he can somehow swap the subway for a spur of SmartTrack that reaches STC, that would be politically brilliant)

The "Hybrid" Gardiner is where I lose him.

Demolishing a major expressway and causing traffic chaos is such a bad idea that Tory is right to oppose this. The traffic in this city is bad enough already and the projections claiming that it will only make traffic worse by a few minutes are garbage. I wish that Tory could succeed in pushing council to stop the endless road closures every single weekend (particularly the annual charity bike ride which is ridiculous) but city council won't let them. The province needs to intervene on this and pass legislation banning the city from closing DVP/Gardiner for special events. The province would never ever allow a charity bike ride on the 401. This severely disrupts the GO bus system and causes traffic chaos. Similarly Tory needs to push to get the DVP and DVP/404/401 interchange widened because the traffic on the DVP is absolutely ridiculous (so bad that it is sometimes faster to take Gardiner/427/407 to get from Toronto to York Region because Gardiner and 427 are not nearly as bad as DVP/404).

The Scarborough subway is far better than any of the much worse alternatives. Toronto needs a larger subway system and you get what you pay for.

The DRL is badly needed but there is not enough money to build it because the province has deliberately prioritized GO electrification over the DRL.

Tory has inherited the Miller LRT fiasco and it was too late for him to change the Eglinton LRT fiasco to actual subways. I hope that this line doesn't get obscenely overcrowded. Fortunately the province has unilaterally canned the Sheppard LRT because this is one of the worst transit proposals of all time. We need a larger subway system in this city (at least 2x what we currently have) and taxes are going to have to go up to pay for it. LRT is a joke and the world's most expensive LRT line is even weirder. We would have been way way better off if Tory had become mayor in 2003. Miller caused a lot of damage to this city and Ford was a direct result of a huge backlash against Miller and "Transit City".

Tory is far far better than any of the previous mayors since amalgamation. Let's hope that he can actually accomplish something and that he doesn't keep doing nothing on a lot of issues because he is afraid that the far left on council won't let him do anything.
 
Yeah, at this rate, andrewpmk might as well advocate reviving Rocco Rossi's tunnelled-Spadina-extension idea.
 

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