This is why we can't have nice things

Diana, if you're reading this, we need to talk.

The Globe has an interactive feature on its website about traffic in Toronto. One of the neat aspects of it is offering readers the chance to submit their own anecdotes about heavy traffic areas in the city. But as anyone with a passing familiarity with anecdotes knows, they are rarely based in reality.

"Diana" writes about the stretch of Eglinton Avenue from Leslie to Yonge, and noting that she "can't wait for an LRT to make this worse." What's puzzling aggravating about this comment is that one block west of Leslie is the point at which the LRT is planned (and was always planned, with or without Mayor Ford's dumb bury-the-whole-thing plan) to go underground and stay underground all the way to Yonge. In other words, over almost the entire distance she's talking about, the LRT will be underground and in no way interfering with road traffic.

Now, it's possible (with a little bit of mental gymnastics) to believe that she might have meant the construction of the LRT - including its station entrances at surface level - will worsen congestion along this stretch. But this is more of the same old "St Clair Disaster" talk. You know, the one where construction of a new dedicated right-of-way for streetcars ran way behind schedule and cost the city more than it expected. People usually forget that one of the biggest reasons (but not the only one) the project was behind schedule was opponents kept dragging the project before the courts to get injunctions halting work and that the TTC portion of the project was not, in fact, over budget. Some of the city's cost overruns (but not all) were caused by having to pay lawyers to defend the project in court. Mistakes were made, but was the end result a disaster? Hardly. But that didn't stop people from using the Globe traffic interactive map to do nothing more than post vague, unsubstantiated complaints about it.

Both Diana's comment and the people who insist on using the opposite-of-reality results of the St Clair project as grounds to object to LRT -- despite them being two completely different modes of public transit --  are pretty good indications of the kind of public planning discourse we witness in Toronto on a daily basis. For those who wonder how Rob Ford ever got elected mayor, this is the reason.