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| Diana, if you're reading this, we need to talk. |
"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
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.
2 comments:
Another thing irritates me about comments like this is that it's emblematic of this debate that has somehow become "cars" versus "public transit".
That's not what it should be when it works. It's transit. It's how people get around the city efficiently.
Zealots on both sides act like it's a zero-sum game. Any time there's a bus -- or worse, a streetcar *spits* -- added to the street, their already shitty commute gets longer and slower.
That's a narrow minded view that assumes you're just adding more giant steel boxes to the line. Many don't make the connection that that one (yes, slower-moving) streetcar or LRT train has hopefully taken several dozen cars off the road. So you're not in a line of 17 cars waiting to turn left at Eglinton. Hopefully now there's 3 cars and an LRT train.
Good transit is good for drivers and TTCers. Hell, pedestrians and cyclists too. When the system works, everyone's commute gets better, and that's a good thing for all of us.
That's a really good point, and I think it was ultimately what lay behind the push to undo the improvements to Jarvis.
The plan was always to reclaim one lane of road from cars and make improvements for everybody - sorely needed left-turn lanes where needed, wider sidewalks in a boulevard configuration for pedestrians, and - almost as an afterthought - there was some room left over for bike lanes.
But the sequence of events started with taking out the fifth lane and painting the bike lanes, which immediately made it into an issue of cars vs bikes. That it was always meant to be about making the whole space better for all modes of transportation, including pedestrians and drivers too, was lost through the zero-sum prism you're talking about.
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