How often do you see some thoughtless numbskull parking on the sidewalk like this, making pedestrians walk on the road around them?
They never get towed, rarely ticketed.
Cars have long taken over and Rossi thinks they're threatened?
Rocco Rossi - "If I'm elected I will Kill Transit City and eliminate Bike Lanes"
- Thread starter james t kirk
- Start date
How often do you see some thoughtless numbskull parking on the sidewalk like this, making pedestrians walk on the road around them?
They never get towed, rarely ticketed.
Cars have long taken over and Rossi thinks they're threatened?
Lots of new condos on Jarvis. Pedestrian traffic has increased at night and not to many 'cheap tenaments' sit on Jarvis.
Dundas crosses the PArkway , it is a problem for cars at teh best of times, the point is instead of using Jarvis St why not use Sherbourne oh wait there is a bike path on Sherbourne that gets about 300 riders a day. Church Street from the lake to Casa Loma amakes more sense than using Jarvis , Unless you want to actively obstruct cars, that is the point of the Jarvis St reconstruction .
I would have agreed with your position a few years ago(on the sheppard subway). But I have been taking it recently during rush hour and it is packed. I would say that as many people get off at the sheppard stop(on the Yonge line) as the bloor stop and almost all head for the sheppard line. I admit this is just an impression, but it is standing room only on the sheppard(at rush). Perhaps they built it and then they came.
Or we could just put a big fat toll on the cars downtown with an exclusion for cabs, emergency, and delivery vehicles, and an additional exemption for one vehicle per resident household. Households with more than one vehicle should be slapped with a fat permit fee on surplus vehicles. Let people hop on transit anyplace in this area for free. That's actually a bit of a subsidy for business as you'd be free an clear to move in the downtown, and you'd only have to pay to get into the core on transit. You could do this for the area south of Bloor, west of the DVP, and east of, oh say, Bathurst / Christy. The toll system would kill congestion, and it reduce the number of people commuting into the downtown in single passenger vehicles. You could get further control by using time of day and day of week pricing. The money from this toll, and the savings from getting rid of TTC collectors would at least partially underwrite the 'hop on for free in downtown' transit. The reduced traffic would make the whole downtown core more pleasant, and it would encourage people not to move to and from the downtown in single passenger vehicles causing congestion throughout the GTA. Then you could start thinking seriously about converting streets / lanes for bike and pedestrian uses. That's leveraging high density for the public good, not defending your freedom to be slightly stupid by taking your single passenger vehicle into the downtown core during the 16 hours a day 'it's bad' thereby frustrating you and everybody else who's on the streets in any capacity.
Why not? Don't say "congestion" because it's been fairly well established that when you reduce road capacity you also reduce traffic volume, which I believe is one of the goals.
If you could widen the road "without cost" I would agree with you, but that is never the case. The extra space has to come from somewhere. The space for the bike lane ultimately has to come at the expense of the properties next to the road, at the expense of sidewalks, at the expense of parking, or at the expense of a traffic lane.
Reducing the quality of the street scene by eating into the properties seems like a ridiculous thing to do, as does narrowing the sidewalks. The goal is to make the street vibrant again and both of those options simply reduce the quality of the road.
Thus bike lanes need to come either from lane reductions or the elimination of parking spaces.
Yes and all of those fancy new condo projects are either south of Queen/Richmond or north of Wellesley where the lane narrowing experiment is irrelevant since Jarvis is a fourlane road at those points.I'm talking about the corridor between those two points.
Also, there is a block of Toronto Community Housing properties at Dundas and Jarvis that backs onto George Street which is full of halfway houses and crack dens. Take a stroll up the block from there and you'll be at the Provincial Courthouse with the cheap daily rate flea bag motel next to it.
No "cheap tenamanets"? maybe get out of your car and take a walk in that area...then get back to me.
Instead of driving on Jarvis, why not take Church or Sherbourne? Oh wait, because it's a car that's different. Bikes should only be allowed on certain streets, cars on every street.
The Jarvis reconstruction isn't for the sake of bikes, it's to beautify the street and make it less of a thoroughfare. Bikelanes were added as an afterthought.
It became a tawdry area because Jarvis was seen as a highway, only a means to get from Moore Park to downtown. It became an ugly area, nobody would walk there.
Those same folks in Moore Park were the first in Canada to restrict cars from driving through their neighbourhood back in the 70s but they scream if it takes a minute longer in their SUV to race down Jarvis.
The Jarvis st reconsrtruction has beutification of the street as an afterthought. The removal of car access to the city was always the prime mover of that concept. I really would not have a problem of restricting cars acces on some streets block off young at Bloor and Queen make it pedestrian and bicycles only. Get the bicycles off adelaide Richmond , Jarvis and University. MAkes it safer for everybody and gets traffic moving in all cases.
So only the chosen get to go into toronto?
The system ytou seem to think would salvage toronto would destroy the core. Businesses would leave in droves the people who live in that area would try to sell there homes but nobodsy would buy. What rigfht does any elected official have to descide what I or anubody for that matter can own if it is a legal product?
Any politician who ran on that platform would be run out of town on a rail, and anybody who tryed to bring it in without running on it would be in worse trouble.
To quote you, "So only the chosen get to go into toronto?".
This proves you don't know the history of getting Jarvis reconstructed, there were no plans for bike lanes until the last minute.
Why stop at banning bikes on those streets, why not eliminate the sidewalk as well? Then you could squeeze in two more lanes and save 30 more precious seconds getting to work. Maybe even add a second deck and double the lanes?
We all know cars are the safest way to travel.
I think under a toll system people would choose for themselves whether to pay the toll or not.
People would certainly want to live nearer where they work, or work nearer where they live, but I do not share your prediction of doom and gloom. We have built a zillion condos in the city in the past few years in the downtown core. All those people will want to work downtown.
It makes sense to intensify the suburbs, building new office spaces there nearer where those people live. It equally makes sense to increase the residential properties in the city, nearer all the offices there. In combination that will mean a lot less commute time for most people.
The notion that the core is dependent on people commuting from the suburbs is flawed. As the core becomes more and more self sufficient (businesses populated by people living in the city) the rising cost of commuting will matter less.
of course it has to be a gradual transition so that people have time to move, change jobs, and generally adjust: Any sudden change would be harmful. It should be a change that phases in over 25 years or something like that.
Actually, no, it's not exclusionary by the simple virtue that transit is cheaper than parking over any time frame to get into the downtown. That's forgetting the cost of vehicle ownership in the first place. By definition it non-exclusionary even if it does limit your 'freedom' to be stupid (and choosing to drive downtown for about 16 hours a day is stupid). Places where similar things have come to pass the downtown cores have had done well. This would be a toll on non-delivery / non-cab / non-emergency vehicles, along with a a permit based fee for households in the affected area with more than one car, in exchange for 'hop on for free' transit service in the given area including those who are exiting the area. (I suppose one subsequent addition that comes to mind would be for handicapped vehicles because that's an accessibility issue.)
People sitting stuck in cars honking isn't 'good for business', high density largely pedestrian traffic is. Improving access and mobility is good for business. If you layer on time of day and day of week tolling you could keep things moving, freeing up 'car space' in the form of lanes and parking lots, and allowing viable car pooling and car movement downtown. It wouldn't just be 'good for business' it would actually be good for people. If there were medium to long term negative impacts your could easily leverage the faucet like nature of variable tolls. Additionally, fixing congestion downtown doesn't just help the downtown, but it helps with congestion on all of the routes into the downtown core.
Now, if a politician were to run on this they'd probably get hammered, but that says more about the state of the voters than the actual 'goodness' of the idea. (Because it's easy enough to google up viable implementations.) People would adjust pretty quickly to the notion of park on the periphery and scoot around for free on transit once you get downtown (taking transit for free back to your vehicle), or be prepared to pay not just to park, but actually enter downtown. You must remember in the entire region I mention there is practically no free parking for non-residents to start with and it is a small ultra dense area... This actually improves access and mobility for more people once they adjust to it by allowing human and transit movement and making sure that the vehicles that are there are actually moving (as opposed to the way things are now).
Ah yes , so we are to socially engineer the city to your specifications?
The statement that a politician would get hammered for running on the program says a lot. So basically you want a set of politicians to impose a major social and economic change on the people of a city without telling them because it would be good for them?
The statement that a politician would get hammered for running on the program says a lot. So basically you want a set of politicians to impose a major social and economic change on the people of a city without telling them because it would be good for them?
Democracy has a lot of failings, and one of them is that many very good policies are hard to put into place because the reality is a lot of people are stupid or ill informed.
Of course the alternative to democracy is generally some authoritarian guy who kills you if you look at him sideways, so we generally decide that the stupid, misinformed policies we have to put up with are not such a bad price to pay for freedom.
That said, it's true that good sensible policies are often shot down by stupid voters.
Of course if I were a politician i would be roasted alive for saying that, but since I'm not a politician I can speak the truth about it. I think "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest" captures the concept well enough.
in reality people will adjust by going elsewhere. its fine to pretend that Canadians are different from the US and we are not a "car" society but we are. given their choice most will drive a car. thats the will of the people speaking.
1. Societies engage in social engineering all of the time. Pretty much the instant you get beyond being hunter gatherers you are social engineering. The only real questions are the degree of consolidated oversight of that engineering, and engineering to what ends. So to that end I favour something of a reasonable split between public / private engineering with that public / private capacity split on local, regional, national lines in some reasonable manner, and while paying heed to the current international environment.
2. I in no way advocate politicians getting elected on one platform and using that to enact a radically different agenda. The ability to do that is one of the surest signs of a very sick democracy. (See the USA with two parties and nobody really acting in the public good and not many viable alternatives on the horizon.) I'm a social democrat, I simply acknowledge that a largish number of things that would be 'good' and work for the 'public good' would be decried by the public for a variety of reasons of varying legitimacy. Nationalism, fear, jingoism, slogans ahead of thought, unexamined truisms, and a self serving corporate media come into play. So do legitimate ideological and philosophical differences. At the end of the day 'a public good' is only as good as the public's acceptance of it in a democracy. Running on a stealth platform then ramming stuff down people's throats is 'not good', but in a health democracy it is punishable and undo-able. Since Canadian democracy is reasonably healthy, that makes it a grossly inefficient gambit. (Works well in the States though.
)3. Your use of 'set of politicians' as a pejorative is telling. In a reasonably healthy democracy the political class represents the will of the people. To the degree that a democracy is healthy lambasting the political class is essentially undemocratic. That's not to say that Canada couldn't improve it's democracy, or have more accountability for politicians, but ultimately our democracy is in a reasonably healthy state. Hating a democratic political class and 'the government' and seeking to marginalize these entities doesn't make individuals more free or the whole more prosperous, but it does undermine the ability to have a public good or public goods, effectively erodes the value of citizenship, and it does do a very effective job of doing is is concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few... This experiment has been done to death in the last 30 years. There is nothing new to learn here beyond some lessons for good and ill...
