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Rob Ford's Toronto

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adma said:
Chow over Ford, 60 to 33
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I'm actually very surprised by that poll. I would have thought in a head to head race Ford would hold on to a lot more of his support. I can understand Ford losing his support in a contest with another righty running, but to see Chow running away is surprising. Then again, with 20 months to go to the election, this poll is just yet another plea from the Star for Chow to run.
 
RRR, Matt knows little about how the budget works. Check out my post on page 653.
 
This is another reason why the Fords have been so bad for this city - we get nowhere when they make stupid statements like this:

Friday morning Mayor Rob Ford had yet commented on Ottawa’s budget news except for a two sentence statement that didn’t mention the DRL. Friday morning, Councillor Doug Ford stepped in.

“We are in favour of a Scarborough Relief Line,” the Etobicoke councillor told reporters. “We’re not against a Downtown Relief Line, but I think the people of Scarborough need to get some relief themselves. They keep getting ignored. We need a subway, continue the Sheppard out to Scarborough. We are in favour of a Downtown Relief Line, but you can’t ignore the people of Scarborough.”
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From this Globe and Mail article today: Fords put a Scarborough subway extension ahead of Downtown Relief Line
 
Got to love this bit:

“First of all, it is easy to just get out there and just make statements. We first do our due diligence,” the councillor said. “We’ve been doing the due diligence from the second we heard about the budget. It’s not as quickly as just throwing numbers out and just come out there cold turkey."
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Really?! This from the folks who claimed that you can get a line just from the private sector alone when even the questionable number crunching showed that *some* government money is necessary?

AoD
 
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one could argue that downtowners have alternatives like cycling and the streetcar, whereas scarbarians are limited to the car or the dreadful bus ride
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And therefore the solution is a subway line where the demand doesn't justify it, and lower priority for where despite such alternatives, the existing routes are already utterly saturated? That's not much of an argument.

AoD
 
Actually, as a pedestrian I was hit by two cyclists on Jarvis after the bike lanes went in. One blowing through a red light at Maitland and another that jumped onto the sidewalk so that he could answer his phone. No incidents to report before the lanes went in or after they came out tho.
 
js97 said:
Obvoiusly strictly politics.

one could argue that downtowners have alternatives like cycling and the streetcar, whereas scarbarians are limited to the car or the dreadful bus ride
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As if it was "downtowners" creating gridlock and filling up transit downtown. Also, where is the bike and pedestrian infrastructure that people deserve downtown?

Most of our transportation network downtown is "reserved" for suburban motorists. The DRL would benefit these suburban motorists the most, since they'd have more of an alternative to driving. We all win.

A scarborough subway would be very impractical. Building LRT along promising corridors and running buses to GO Stations as well as increasing GO frequency (and subsidising low-income riders) makes a lot more sense for everyone.
 
whatever said:
Actually, as a pedestrian I was hit by two cyclists on Jarvis after the bike lanes went in. One blowing through a red light at Maitland and another that jumped onto the sidewalk so that he could answer his phone. No incidents to report before the lanes went in or after they came out tho.
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And yesterday on my bike I was almost hit by a driver who was talking on the phone and blowing past a stop sign.

So?

As a pedestrian I'd much rather have bikes doing whatever they want than gridlocked vehicles filling my surroundings with polluting fumes and reducing everyone's life expectancy.
 
js97 said:
Obvoiusly strictly politics.
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Politicking from our Joe Schmo mayor? No way... the pensioners in North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke love him because he's the un-groomed politician... he ain't like the rest. Ford doesn't have the know-how to be doing those shenanigans. Why, he just loves the good folks of Scarborough so much he wants them to have a subway.

In all seriousness... every other city in the world builds subway lines that run from the outer areas to the city centre. Only in large, expansive systems is anyone building mass transit lines entirely within the outer regions of a city.
 
RC8 said:
A scarborough subway would be very impractical. Building LRT along promising corridors and running buses to GO Stations as well as increasing GO frequency (and subsidising low-income riders) makes a lot more sense for everyone.
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Was building the bloor street viaduct with space for a subway later impractical? Was building RC Harris for double the original volume at the time impractical? Was building the subway all the way out to Warden impractical in the sixties? Warden was farm pasture back then.....

They can be called one of two things, impractical or forward thinking.

As for LRT's vs subways, I don't care which. Just bury them. If you want to get people out of their car and take transit, they need to be underground. No one will give up their car to stand in the middle of Eglinton in the dead of winter waiting for an LRT. They'd be willing to leave their car if they could wait underground where it's warm.

What's the point of giving Scarborough a surface LRT, if there would be enough volume to justify a subway in 20 or 30 years? We'll be barely finished paying off the LRT and we'll have to start paying for the burying of it. Build it properly the first time. It only gets more expensive every day.
 
Maybe you don't want to see City Hall's money spent strategically and in a fiscally responsible manner, but many of us do.

Building a subway to Scarborough would land us less bang for our buck than myriad of other projects available to us at the moment.

More importantly, the subway as championed by Rob Ford would do very little to turn any part of Scarborough into a destination in its own right. The future of urban communities is to become less dependent on distant downtowns and more self-contained. We need to help Scarborough do this, while increasing access to Toronto simultaneously.
 
junior43 said:
Was building the bloor street viaduct with space for a subway later impractical? Was building RC Harris for double the original volume at the time impractical? Was building the subway all the way out to Warden impractical in the sixties? Warden was farm pasture back then.....

They can be called one of two things, impractical or forward thinking.

As for LRT's vs subways, I don't care which. Just bury them. If you want to get people out of their car and take transit, they need to be underground. No one will give up their car to stand in the middle of Eglinton in the dead of winter waiting for an LRT. They'd be willing to leave their car if they could wait underground where it's warm.

What's the point of giving Scarborough a surface LRT, if there would be enough volume to justify a subway in 20 or 30 years? We'll be barely finished paying off the LRT and we'll have to start paying for the burying of it. Build it properly the first time. It only gets more expensive every day.
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Hopefully in 20 or 30 years, exciting, vibriant new neighbourhoods would have developed along LRT routes, so that people living in Scarborough could walk, bike or take a short ride on an LRT to their destination, be it work, shopping or play. In other words, Main suburban roads like Eglinton and Sheppard would be like Queen and Dundas. Subways along these roads would all but kill any life on them not near a station. Please don't use the excuse about life between current subway stations isn't dead. It isn't dead, because it was there long before the subway. Not the case in the suburbs.
 
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