They imagine barriers that are large chain-link containers full of vegetation. It’s a pretty simple solution, but it has the power to transform a dead zone into something pleasant, park-like and alive. No doubt the transportation engineers, safety tyrants and bylaw purists can come up with dozens of reasons why it won’t work. They will cite chapter and verse to convince us that “noise walls” must be there for our own good.
To them, we say thanks but no thanks. It is precisely this sort of thinking that created so many of these perceived “problems” in the first place. Recently, however, their planning “principles” have been revealed for the pseudo science they are.
The objective must be to build an infrastructure — transit and otherwise — that’s fully integrated into the urban context. After all, to a large extent, a city is nothing but an inhabitable infrastructure; the idea that the two must be kept away from each other is a contemporary fiction that has done enormous damage to cities, especially in North America. That doesn’t mean we want kids playing on train tracks; but the answer need not entail slicing the city into isolated sections, each walled off from the next.
Not only does Metrolinx not see the forest for the trees, it has lost sight of why it exists. It has had to fight heroically against bottomless political ignorance, but if it forgets what the battle is about, it has no chance of winning.
