The city of Toronto was 600k in 1998. By the 1920s, the city was most definitely not 500k.
So... except for the fact their traffic doesn't flow better than ours, their traffic flows better than ours. Great logic.
Uhh... This is a democracy, and people voted for Miller, just like they voted for every Mayor since David Crombie who recommended the same thing. Deal with it. Driving a car isn't democracy, by the way. Notice how people drive cars in China. Despite you're "savvy" debating skills, nobody is talking about getting rid of roads throughout the GTA. So why you would list aggregate figures for transport in Toronto is bewildering.
If you want discuss transit in the downtown core (you know, where the Gardiner is) 47% is TTC, 19% is GO, 26% is auto (municipal road) and 8% of it is the Gardiner. More to the point, only 15% of Gardiner users drive on this particular stretch, dropping the total to 1.2% of trips to the downtown core. Using you're horrible logic alone, we should tear it down (if only 1.2% of people use it, democracy dictates it goes).
Ohh, yea, the neutrality is just dripping off you. You're savvy-ness is a marvel to the developed world, Churchill and Cicero bow to you're rhetorical skills.
Well, the beautiful thing about the internet is that I COULD be Mayor Miller, or I could be Churchill, writing from the grave for all you know.
If we're going to dance around semantics, then Toronto and its outlying 'burbs were well over half a million in the twenties. You know that, so stop playing coy.
And didn't Miller get something like 47% of 43% of those who bothered to vote. My delta percent may be a little rusty, but that is, like, 20% of the vote. Great mandate there! Let's not waste another $11 million taxpayers' dollars doing a study to find out why municipal elections have the lowest turn out of all. I'll save Silly Hall the money: because no one talks about the real issues. You know, the issues beyond those that matter to the unions or the poverty industry. And who ran against him anyway. What was her name?
And the Gardiner isn't 'owned' by the downtown core. That is the point. The Province should never have dumped the expressways on the city for exactly this reason, but that is another issue. Explain to me why the Gardiner is jammed EASTBOUND in the morning? (Well, other than being choked with dump trucks and cement mixers.)
Vancouver has no freeways at all, which is a greater tragedy, but at least they do have one-way streets downtown and 6 lane streets in the mid-burbs and suburbs. If Queen St., College, Dundas or ANY friggin' street downtown were 6 lanes, we could have a serious discourse about tearing down the Gardiner. Hell, even Jarvis chokes off south of Adelaide! But they aren't, so we can't. Oh, by the way, why don't we plant some trees down the middle of Jarvis while we are at it --Oops! That's right! Rae and the boys want to do that, too!
Clearly we cannot knock through those streets TODAY, and obviously 60 story towers are popping up like mushrooms downtown, so the real discussion should be on WIDENING the Gardiner and DVP to get those nasty, awful cars OUT of the neighborhoods and onto the freeways where they belong. Or do we forget why the Gardiner was built in the first place. (Hint: then fashionable Parkdale wanted the cars OFF their streets.)
As to the last point, look it up in the Star's archives. They did a 3 page expose about 3 or 4 years ago about transport in the city. Frankly, I was shocked by their figures. With the money the TTC gets, I had thought 50% took the subway to work, but it turns out it was 16%. Considering how much the Toyota Star hates cars, then their figures must be true.
Let's spend a billion dollars on 5 stops to nowhere that nobody uses, but let's not spend $10 million on an environmental impact study to possibly, maybe widen the DVP because (get ready for this) - too many people might use it. That is what passes for logic in Silly Hall these days.
