MAYORAL ISSUES

[Travis007]

I used to pass by this Dupont underpass all the time. The public wall art was great, added some character to the otherwise, bland streetscape. I hope the other murals/paid graffiti works along the other underpass walls in the neighbourhood don't get covered. Check out how bad this wall looks now, after they covered it up;

http://www.blogto.com/arts/2011/06/t...with_graffiti/

[Mollywood]

Originally Posted by AndrewJM3D

I'm looking forward to seeing what the audit comes up with. I thought he ran on a platform of transparent government? he must have meant for everybody but him. What are you hiding Mr Ford?

If he broke the law to get into office, would there be a way to get him out of city hall?

It's funny how the politicians who claim to be the most open and transparent, always turn out to be the most secretive and sneaky, once they are elected.

[Marbur66]

Originally Posted by Mollywood

It's funny how the politicians who claim to be the most open and transparent, always turn out to be the most secretive and sneaky, once they are elected.

What are you basing that statement on?

[vid]

Originally Posted by Marbur66

What are you basing that statement on?

Stephen Harper, probably.

Did Jean Chretien campaign on accountability at all? He fucked that up pretty bad, too.

[Taller, Better]

Originally Posted by Marbur66

What are you basing that statement on?

Experience, likely. Seems to happen a great deal of late.

[Taller, Better]

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/...ant-bike-lanes

65% of Torontonians say no to road tolls; 72% want bike lanes
Published On Fri Jun 03 2011



David Rider Urban Affairs Bureau Chief
Related

* Forum Research poll

Torontonians strongly oppose using road tolls to pay for Mayor Rob Ford’s planned — but unfunded — Sheppard subway line, says a new poll.

Forum Research’s automated telephone survey of 1,050 Torontonians conducted Wednesday found, however, strong support for Ford’s soon-to-be-released plan to put physically separated bike lanes on some downtown streets.

On tolls, the idea of charging drivers on main thoroughfares remains a non-starter with the public, said Forum president Lorne Bozinoff.

Some 65 per cent of respondents said they don’t support tolls to pay for the Sheppard line. When rephrased as road tolls to reduce traffic congestion, the support was only slightly higher, at 43 per cent.....................

read article in its entirety here:
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/...ant-bike-lanes

[Marcanadian]

Ford's approval rating drops to 57%

[Nouvellecosse]

The majority of people actually approve of this guy? Still!?!?

[Taller, Better]

The tide is turning.

[allurban]

Originally Posted by vid

Meanwhile, Thunder Bay's progressive mayor is exceeding expectations and his popularity is growing.

Do not adjust your television set. We control the transmission now.

Do you control the horizontal and the vertical (transmission)?

I know you guys already control our future thanks to your manufacturing of GO bilevel train cars and TTC Toronto Rocket trains and future streetcars & LRT trains.

Shit, if something ever happens to Thunder Bay, we would be pretty much screwed in about 2 decades (when all the stuff they built for us wears out). Seriously, thanks tho

Cheers, m

[vid]

We control the horizontal, vertical and diagonal.

BTW, I've been seeing GO train bi-level cars leaving on a pretty much daily basis. They're very shiny.

[AndrewJM3D]

GTA needs gas hikes, road tolls, congestion charges to fund transit: Experts



Brett Popplewell Staff Reporter : Toronto Star

Put a road toll on every highway in the GTA. Throw in a congestion charge in the downtown core. And hike up gas taxes in the region by another 10 cents.

Do it all to raise money for public transit.

Do it all and this city might solve the gridlock that has Toronto moving more slowly than almost any other city in the Western world.

Do it all and the stretch of Highway 401 that cuts through town might no longer be the most congested chunk of highway in North America. The average commuter might get back some of the 80 minutes per day they spend going to and from work. And Torontonians might save some of the $6 billion they currently waste in time, fuel and productivity while idling in the city’s arteries.

Call it the war on the car or call it sound economics, says Harry Kitchen, professor of economics at Trent University.

But whatever you want to call it, the GTA’s drivers are going to have to accept it.

“It’s inevitable,” says Kitchen. “It’s going to come. It has to come.”

Even if road tolls and other new revenue sources make economic sense, should the potential billions of dollars raised by them go, as suggested, toward the Sheppard subway extension — an unfunded $4.2 billion project that former TTC chief David Gunn says will only add to the city’s transit woes?

It would make more sense for the new charges to help fund a system that makes better use of buses and eases congestion on the Yonge St. subway line, says Gunn, who’s now retired and living in Cape Breton.

“The whole Sheppard line boggles the mind,” he says. “The Yonge St. line is at capacity, so you’re going to build more feeder lines into it? How does that make any sense?”

“Toronto is heading for a cliff,” Gunn warns. Politicians are pushing us towards the edge.

Last week, Gordon Chong, who was selected by Mayor Rob Ford to figure out how the city might fund the Sheppard extension, said it will take pay-as-you-drive fees like road tolls, congestion charges and other taxes to pay for the subway line.

On Monday, Ford, the man who once publicly declared the war on the car to be over, said he was absolutely opposed to any notion of tolls or congestion charges.

Two days later, a public-opinion poll said 65 per cent of Torontonians also opposed the idea.

So here we are, caught in gridlock, with no idea how to get out of it.

Congestion is a fact of life in every city, but it’s worse in Toronto than in New York, London or even Los Angeles.

Put another way: if Toronto were a human, it would have died long ago, because its arteries are far too clogged.

A 2010 report from the Toronto Board of Trade said Torontonians spend an average 80 minutes a day commuting to and from work. The board has pegged the annual economic impact of congestion in the GTA and Hamilton at $6 billion in lost productivity.

Last year, the board released a report meant to educate decision makers on different ways to fight gridlock and raise money for transit.

It outlined how $4 billion a year could be raised off the backs of drivers through four new levies that would each bring in $1 billion. They included a $1 per day surcharge on commercial parking spaces in the city; a 10 cent gas tax on every litre of fuel sold in the GTA; a 10 cent per kilometre toll on the QEW, Gardiner Expressway, Don Valley Parkway and the GTA’s 400-series highways; and an unspecified congestion charge in a restricted zone (presumably the downtown core).

The board’s proposals were similar to what Kitchen recommended in a 2008 report for the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario.

“People ranted on me when I made these recommendations,” Kitchen says. “(Canadian) drivers generally haven’t been asked to pay for their use of our roads.”

Other countries have found ways to make commuters pay-as-they-drive through tolls and congestion charging. Kitchen says the GTA must follow that lead.

Tolled roads are common in many developed countries, but somehow Canada has evolved into a mostly toll-free nation. Congestion charging in cities like London, Stockholm and Oslo is used to raise money for road maintenance and public transit. Other cities, including Vancouver and Montreal, collect money from taxes on gas sold within their respective cities to help fund public transit.

“Right now the people using private cars in the GTA are not paying a proper price for using the roads,” says Kitchen.

Any road pricing scheme would have to be implemented slowly, however, because driving people off the roads could swamp the region’s underfunded public transit systems.

So, Kitchen says the province should first implement a regionwide gas tax. Why? Because gas hikes don’t seem to drive people off the roads, but the profits could and should be earmarked to prepare the public transit systems for increased ridership. Only then, Kitchen says, should tolls be placed on the region’s major arteries. After that, the city or the region could start looking at congestion charging.

It’s a grand vision. And yet, Kitchen’s projected revenues from such schemes are much lower than those projected by the Board of Trade and mount to just $1.32 billion per year. At that rate, it would take more than three years to pay for the Sheppard extension.

That’s not going to be enough, says Joe Mihevc, a city councillor who thinks Ford’s Sheppard line is destined to economically cripple the city no matter how it’s financed.

Ford says he has a mandate to build the subway and believes the private sector can help the city pay for it.

But Mihevc says: “If we shut down everything the city pays for and let all of the money go to the Sheppard line, we still couldn’t pay for it. That’s how ridiculous this is.”

“The TTC is $2 billion behind on state of good repair. Any money raised needs to first go to fixing that before we can start building projects.”

As for the notion of congestion charging, Mihevc says he can’t imagine downtown councillors supporting such a charge because it could potentially drive business out of town.

It’s a classic Catch-22 that no one seems to know how to fix.

Not even Gunn.

“You’ve got some major problems and no great vision to get you out of it,” he says.

“You really need — instead of the politicians having a dream at night and waking up in the morning and running in and saying this is it — you need something that’s properly thought out.

“And then you need to pay for it.”

[vid]

“The whole Sheppard line boggles the mind,” he says. “The Yonge St. line is at capacity, so you’re going to build more feeder lines into it? How does that make any sense?”

I've been saying this the whole fucking time and I don't even live there!!!!!!

[Filip]

Originally Posted by vid

I've been saying this the whole fucking time and I don't even live there!!!!!!

Yet Transit City was going to dump nuuuuumerous lines onto that!

I love how people tend to forget that little fact.

[allurban]

Originally Posted by vid

We control the horizontal, vertical and diagonal.

BTW, I've been seeing GO train bi-level cars leaving on a pretty much daily basis. They're very shiny.

oohhh the diagonal as well. Ok I'm sold, moving to Thunder Bay (if there are any teaching jobs offered up there...strangely enough I haven't seen any on ApplytoEducation.com)

Bombardier Bilevel train cars ... are a very interesting design - I remember the first time I went to Florida and saw what I thought were GO bilevels - turns out it was the "Tri-City Commuter service" (they have the same green & white stripe design with a different logo).

The bilevels show up in so many communities now - I have to wonder if there is someone cataloging their photos (aside from someone at Bombardier, of course).

Cheers, m

[jje10001]

Originally Posted by Filip

Yet Transit City was going to dump nuuuuumerous lines onto that!

I love how people tend to forget that little fact.

Dunno about that, but an overloaded Yonge Line would logically lead to the construction of the DRL.

At least Transit City had shovels in the ground, compared to the mostly-unfunded Sheppard expansion.

[Filip]

I still don't understand the lack of political capital for the construction of the DRL. A healthy and accessible downtown Toronto benefits the entire Golden Horseshoe. If Torontonians can't get around their own city we have major problems.

[jje10001]

It's not being built because the idea hasn't been pounded into the minds of Torontonians, unlike Sheppard or Eglinton.

Traffic problems in Toronto are still not bad enough to cause people to want a subway, in my option.

[current]

Torontoist online article:

Queen's Quay Revitalization About to Get Derailed?

By Hamutal Dotan on June 3, 2011 3:20 PM

Toronto's central waterfront—the heavily-travelled stretch of Queen's Quay between Bathurst and Lower Jarvis—has long been slated for a makeover by Waterfront Toronto. The plans include a complete revamp of the streetscape, and require that the streetcar tracks currently running through the centre of Queens Quay be shifted a bit south from their current location.

Today, the TTC issued a report in anticipation of the next Commission meeting on June 8 [PDF: http://www3.ttc.ca/About_the_TTC/Com...ement_of_S.pdf]. In that report: a recommendation that unless Waterfront Toronto come up with the full funding for the revitalization project by the end of this month, the TTC proceed with rebuilding the tracks in their current location. This would mean that if Waterfront Toronto proceeds with its elements of the project later on, some changes to that overall plan would need to be made, though these changes are described in the report as "relatively minor."

As it turns out, one of those minor changes might be turning Queen's Quay into a one-way street.

The revitalization plan calls for moving the tracks south, having all traffic lanes—in both directions—north of the tracks, and a widened pedestrain concourse south of the tracks. Keeping the tracks in the current location will mean that there is only room for traffic travelling in one direction north of the tracks.

According to the TTC, the tracks are worn and need to be rebuilt relatively urgently (a streetcar derailed in April) as temporary fixes are only going so far; they are planning to do the work during the 2012 construction season. And thus, they say, they cannot wait any longer for Waterfront Toronto to come up with financing for the streetscape revitalization, and must instead procedd with relaying the tracks in their current location—a smaller project for which the TTC has its own funding....


....We asked Piattelli if WT knew that the TTC was going to request funding guarantees by the end of the month. She says that they did not, and in fact WT was only aware of today's TTC report when Torontoist got in touch with the organization with our questions about it.

Both the TTC and Waterfront Toronto agree that they should be working in concert, and that all the construction projects should, as much as possible, be done in tandem. If the TTC approves the recommendation in this report, then either: the City will have to agree to reallocate the funds within the next month, and the entire revitalization project proceeds; or there will need to be a revised revitalization plan which includes (a) the possibility of turning a two-way street into a one-way street, and (b) putting Waterfront Toronto in the position of having to rip up roadwork in order to accomodate its own, later construction, rather than utilizing the TTC's construction period to do work as well.

Any guesses as to how our mayor feels about that?


Read More: http://torontoist.com/2011/06/queens...t_derailed.php

[Taller, Better]

Originally Posted by current

Any guesses as to how our mayor feels about that?

I take it that is a rhetorical question.... I seriously doubt if he has ever seen Queen's Quay.