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Rob Ford's Toronto

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ahm said:
I have seen it nosed about several times [...] that subway construction can be accomplished by as little as 100m at a time. [...] All I can say to that is that it strikes me as being more expensive
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Absolutely. Do they propose to leave the boring machines at the end of the tunnels, and only run them when there is cash? Only purchase rail a little at a time, or a few subway cars at a shot? Honestly, do they think people renovate their houses a wall at a time, or that one can construct a building by paying for a floor at a time when one gets the money together? Does the city upgrade the water or sewer system by city block, or build highways 100 meters at a time?

Really, understanding the planning, financing, and construction of these kind of projects is not rocket science -- the city does similar kinds of large infrastructure contracting all the time. I don't know why councillors seem to think that subway construction is immune to the factors of efficiencies for large scale work that affect other projects.
 
RC8 said:
I'd feel more comfortable crossing Spadina and King on a red light than Markham and Lawrence with a right of way. Different standards indeed.

If you are interested I encourage you to look at the data of car accidents/pedestrian collisions in Toronto. Intersections such as Markham and Lawrence are orders of magnitude more dangerous than the likes of King and Spadina. Not only are you more likely to get hit - you are more likely to get killed if an accident does take place.

There's resources like this around that shed light on why that is:
http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/walking/pdf/ped_collision_study-full_report.pdf
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The only time it may be safer to cross at Spadina & King on a red light is after 5pm when traffic is blocking the intersection so everything is at a standstill. Having worked at that intersection for 10 years I can't tell you the number of times I've almost been run over at Spadina & Adelaide when I had the right of way crossing (one block up).

BTW they study clearly states that most accidents occur mid-block where the driver has right of way. 2nd is where pedestrian crosses at intersection without right of way (driver has right of way).

I don't know how many people walk through the Markham & Lawrence intersection but from what I've seen many people are crossing the intersection mid-block Lawrence in between Greenbrae and Markham on the weekends, and many people take the bus.

My point is that this suburban agenda about detached homes and driving SUV's is a myth. Only 39% of Scarborough lives in a detached home and 57% in a 24 hour period use a single passenger vehicle for transportation (Transit Tomorrow Survey 2006). Considering the gaps in TTC service in Scarborough this is pretty good % of population using public transit, which is a mostly bus network with many buses not running after 1a.m, even the RT doesn't have subway hours it stops at 1:30.

Perhaps the divide is more about income and demographics. There has been a great white flight out of 416 suburbs since the mid-80's which is well known.
 
Spadina and Adelaide is a much more dangerous intersection than Spadina and King, and it needs to be re-worked. This much needed re-working is a consensus downtown, and local councillor Adam Vaughan has been trying to look into it for years.

It hasn't been easy, however, because of suburban councillors being protective of the expressway-like status of Richmond and Adelaide. The process has taken ages unnecessarily - and that's a direct doing of the suburban agenda I brought up before, the same one that prevents Yonge street from accommodating wider sidewalks and bike lanes, and that keeps cars along all of King St. Many ideas that would improve these spaces for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users (who make up the overwhelming majority of street users there) never come to council because they would be instantly defeated by suburban councillors.

As I said before, the people of Scarborough don't benefit from the car-loving detached-home loving agenda. They are profoundly hurt because of it - both drivers and non-drivers.

If you read that report (and other similar ones) carefully you'll see that a very large percentage of collisions - fatal collisions at that - occurred in arterial suburban intersections where pedestrians had the right of way. These where very few pedestrians cross at all! Downtown has hundreds and hundreds of times the number of pedestrians you see on suburban sidewalks, but there's only marginally more collisions and most of them are minor.
 
Personally, I figure there's no point in getting worked up about any video claims until it actually surfaces.
 
...especially since it sounds like this guy is holding on to it for "insurance". We all know what's supposedly in the video, so there's really no reason to hold onto it and not show it unless he's using it to keep someones mouth shut. If the mouth stays shut then the video never surfaces.
 
scar_resident said:
We also want clean protected parks as we have seen too much of our green space sacrificed to build condos in the name of density. Downtown had parking lots to convert which was praised for desnity, in the suburbs the developers took over small forests and parks which for some reason was praised for density as well.
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Uh, actually, the bulk of what's being taken over "in the name of density" in the aging 'burbs isn't said "small forests and parks": a great deal of it is aging strip malls and--yes--parking lots, too. Or brownfield development. And more often than not, when said "small forests and parks" are involved, it's private property, i.e. large lots subdivided for townhouses and infill. If it seems to you like more "forest/park-type" destruction is happening in Scarborough than in Toronto, it's simply the consequence of Scarborough's hitherto low-density development pattern, i.e. there's more ambiguously forest/park-type space that's "developable" there than in comparatively tightly-packed Toronto.

And technically, hasn't suburbanism *always* been the, uh, "densification" of forest/parkland? What you're saying of developers has been happening for decades, already...
 
GenerationW said:
Extending existing lines is the closest you can come to doing that.
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Incredibly stupid way to go about building transit. With every single little extension, you need to build new terminal facilities. You could easily be looking at wasted money in the billions of dollars (depending on the individual needs of the line, of course).

Aren't conservatives supposed to save money?
 
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urbantoby said:
According to this APTN reporter, the crack video exists and is in possession of a lawyer in Toronto. Thoughts?

https://twitter.com/afixedaddress/statuses/357927637051637760

And further adds:

"It's being kept in safe keeping for one of the people arrested in the drug arrests.

https://twitter.com/afixedaddress/statuses/357928132956798976
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I think this is unlikely. If a lawyer was keeping this video on behalf of a client why didn't the client instruct the lawyer to collect the $200,000 from Gawker when they had the chance?
 
ttk77 said:
...especially since it sounds like this guy is holding on to it for "insurance". We all know what's supposedly in the video, so there's really no reason to hold onto it and not show it unless he's using it to keep someones mouth shut. If the mouth stays shut then the video never surfaces.
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My thinking: the video has good possibility for surfacing once the election kicks into full gear. Then, it would go to the highest bidder.
 
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