FS:
For your record, I think the debate over your competence, or the lackthereof, has been throughly settled in the previous discussion in this very thread about the LRV facility. Like RF, you have proven to be ill-informed, unwilling to admit to errors, eager to blame others for your mistakes, and when push comes to shove, offers nothing but verbose apologies that is short on genuine regrets but laden with emotional manipulation. Please, individuals of your typology are quite frankly inappropriate to lead in ANY setting.
Oh, I've been humbled by that whole experience, I had no idea that I was coming across as crazed to the forum. Reading back the posts now, I wished I had taken more time to edit and preview before I hit submit. It did however make me realize something, that June of last year Rob Ford was present at that TTC meeting in Leslieville standing up for the constituents while according to anecdotal evidence Giambrone, Bussin and Fletcher were indifferent to the questions being raised. This was long before he could've possibly known Miller was resigning or Tory would not be running in opposition; and he was in one of the safest ward seats in the city. Ergo, what did he stand to gain via being there? It sounds like a genuine case of caring about community issues. Seems like a lot of people don't get it. This isn't so much about Rob Ford as it is about the backlash against self serving politicians using their council seat to promote their own interests and their political agenda which goes opposite to their elected position. They should be representing their constituents best interests, not their own. People are tired of watching tax dollars being spent by councillors on what is basically political activism rather than what is good for the city. It is what drives people to dispair. Manage the cities money, spend it wisely is all we ask. Very few to date have achieved this and those that have are always right of center who realize whose money they are spending. It has to stop somewhere, somehow.
And before I forget - at least be a tad original when it comes to "your" ideas on cutting night service - as per Towhey's blog on the same topic posted eons ago.
AoD
You know, Towhey's blog hadn't even occured to me when I wrote that. This is just another prime example of how much Team Ford's viewpoints kind of coalesce with my own. I don't see how the public sector is all that much more beneficial for several essential services than what private companies could offer. TTC has become a self-serving monopoly - it's overstaffed and overpaid; it's shoving light-rail down the public's throats most of us do not want; its service reliability, speed, and customer relations hace all gone downhill. Miller likes to equate Europe with the "world-class" standards that Toronto should thrive to be living up to (inferiority complex, much?). Did you know that European countries, whose supranational EU government has rigorously enforced "competition" schemes in transport, have basically forced the public-sector out of transportation? In general, the European authorities have split their rail operations between the publicly owned tracks and rights-of-way and the private or semi-private rail service providers with the intention of using the track owner to ensure equitable distribution of resources throughout the country and "better service" through competition in train operations. The biggest expansions of public transit anywhere up until now where done by private companies before they were made public (early NYC, London, Paris, etc). This is because money isn't wasted on uneconomic lines.
I think there is plenty of value in thinking about transit in terms of "things we do because we think the make sense in their own right" and "things we do because we want to have a more fair society". When you combine the two into the same agency, rational decision making becomes paralyzed. The fact that Canadian transit systems have become hugely burdened with social service functions is killing them financially, preventing expansion where it is needed, and creates a stigma around transit, buses in particular, generally as a service for poor and minorities. To change this stigma would very much depend on the incentives the company has to run the services. The buses in London are run by private companies and can run the buses on their own schedules to roughly meet supply and demand. But they also get to capture the revenue they earn, so they have an incentive to keep up good service. The people who are advocating privatization or PPP of public transit (at least those who have any political clout) are not suggesting that the there not be any regulation of transit fares or where transit routes are put. In fact, most of them still want the government to completely make those decisions. They just want the operations of the system to be privatized. Maybe a trial basis outsourcing of TTC operations would make the workers more appreciative of what they have and what they stand to lose via being too greedy, lazy and rude to customers. I applaud any politician with the gumption to challenge a union monopoly in a bid to save taxpayers' money.
