Towered
Senior Member
Aside from Milczyn, why does Etobicoke keep electing complete fools to council? Bah.
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Milczyn's at least a partial fool - he wanted to sell TTC station names to companies.
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Dichotomy
Banned
Are the lunatics in charge of the Asylum?
For the record, I live downtown. For 11 years I took the DVP to work. For the past 6 months, I have taken the Gardiner. I get on and off at Jarvis every day. What is being proposed is suicide.
1. Yes, the Gardiner is ugly. Would we build it today? No. But it is all we have. It should be widened, or better yet, a 16 lane tunnel under the harbor - but that is dreaming, isnt’ it?
2. Take the cost estimates and triple them. See: Skydome. See: Pickering Nuclear. Governments have no handle on doing anything on time or on budget.
3. What about the dozen lanes of train tracks? Aren’t they pretty? I love the steel skeleton under the tracks at Sherbourne and Parliament. The pigeon droppings are great for walking on.
3. See: Eglinton Ave/Allen Rd. for the future.
4. Are we forgetting that the traffic lights along the Lakeshore are 3-way? Has anyone seen the typical ramp tie-ups NOW on Jarvis on a weekday evening? Those are downtown dwellers going home, by the way.
5. 76% of the people in this city drive to work. (The Toronto Star’s own figures.) Stop social engineering and start obeying the people.
Take care in comparing Toronto to other cities. Central Toronto is a transportation fiasco. Would the city father’s 75 years ago had the foresight to widen Yonge, Kingston Rd., Parkside, Bloor/Danforth, O’Connor, Mt.Pleasant…well, you get the idea. Even Vancouver has 6 lane arterial roads in the central city: Kingsway, Hastings, etc. Toronto needs expressways because the city was very badly laid out. The grid only works if the grid is ringed with 6 or 8 lane arterial roads.
80 floors on the corner of Yonge/Bloor? Where are those cars going?
Look at a map of Toronto. Really look at it. There is a black hole east of Bathurst, as King, College, Davenport, and others disappear. How is one to go east-west? Bloor is one lane all day. St. Clair is under seige. Oh, that’s right - we can drive all the way north to Eglinton. Oops, it is one lane eastbound, too. Sorry.
How about north-south? Leslie St. ends, Bayview ends, Yonge St. is permanently plugged.
Is anyone really in charge of this city? When the Gardiner is stopped on Christmas Day, there is something seriously wrong. This is not about commuters, this is about families coming to the Island or a game and tourists being confronted with traffic that rivals L.A. This is about all those lovely condos: do you think none of those people drive? The Gardiner is stopped eastbound and westbound in the morning - now that is progress!
Here is one last closing argument for all those socialist bums who think anything on 4 wheels is the Devil Incarnate:
I walk my dog at Sunnyside, Queens Quay and Cherry Beach 12 months of the year and let me tell you, I am very, very lonely for 9 of those months. This is the Great White North, not Amsterdam.
Let’s spend the money on the parks we have, and forget about blowing cash we don’t have on pie-in-the-sky dreams just because a bunch of politicians want a ‘legacy.’
For the record, I live downtown. For 11 years I took the DVP to work. For the past 6 months, I have taken the Gardiner. I get on and off at Jarvis every day. What is being proposed is suicide.
1. Yes, the Gardiner is ugly. Would we build it today? No. But it is all we have. It should be widened, or better yet, a 16 lane tunnel under the harbor - but that is dreaming, isnt’ it?
2. Take the cost estimates and triple them. See: Skydome. See: Pickering Nuclear. Governments have no handle on doing anything on time or on budget.
3. What about the dozen lanes of train tracks? Aren’t they pretty? I love the steel skeleton under the tracks at Sherbourne and Parliament. The pigeon droppings are great for walking on.
3. See: Eglinton Ave/Allen Rd. for the future.
4. Are we forgetting that the traffic lights along the Lakeshore are 3-way? Has anyone seen the typical ramp tie-ups NOW on Jarvis on a weekday evening? Those are downtown dwellers going home, by the way.
5. 76% of the people in this city drive to work. (The Toronto Star’s own figures.) Stop social engineering and start obeying the people.
Take care in comparing Toronto to other cities. Central Toronto is a transportation fiasco. Would the city father’s 75 years ago had the foresight to widen Yonge, Kingston Rd., Parkside, Bloor/Danforth, O’Connor, Mt.Pleasant…well, you get the idea. Even Vancouver has 6 lane arterial roads in the central city: Kingsway, Hastings, etc. Toronto needs expressways because the city was very badly laid out. The grid only works if the grid is ringed with 6 or 8 lane arterial roads.
80 floors on the corner of Yonge/Bloor? Where are those cars going?
Look at a map of Toronto. Really look at it. There is a black hole east of Bathurst, as King, College, Davenport, and others disappear. How is one to go east-west? Bloor is one lane all day. St. Clair is under seige. Oh, that’s right - we can drive all the way north to Eglinton. Oops, it is one lane eastbound, too. Sorry.
How about north-south? Leslie St. ends, Bayview ends, Yonge St. is permanently plugged.
Is anyone really in charge of this city? When the Gardiner is stopped on Christmas Day, there is something seriously wrong. This is not about commuters, this is about families coming to the Island or a game and tourists being confronted with traffic that rivals L.A. This is about all those lovely condos: do you think none of those people drive? The Gardiner is stopped eastbound and westbound in the morning - now that is progress!
Here is one last closing argument for all those socialist bums who think anything on 4 wheels is the Devil Incarnate:
I walk my dog at Sunnyside, Queens Quay and Cherry Beach 12 months of the year and let me tell you, I am very, very lonely for 9 of those months. This is the Great White North, not Amsterdam.
Let’s spend the money on the parks we have, and forget about blowing cash we don’t have on pie-in-the-sky dreams just because a bunch of politicians want a ‘legacy.’
waterloowarrior
Senior Member
did someone open a portal to the 1960s?
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
Too bad "socialist bums" showed up so late in the post. Gotta love this one though:
AoD
- emphasis mine.
AoD
allabootmatt
Senior Member
...somehow, every large European city survives without a grid of expressways. And so have we. Relative to every American city and even Montreal, Toronto has a tiny inner-city expressway network. Making it a little tinier isn't going to change much. Since none of the things you so fervently wish had happened 75 years ago (demolishing businesses and homes to make room for cars, that is) is going to happen now, we may as well solve our transportation problems in the only way that we know will work: by building more transit.
Also, there's always a bite-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face element to a lot of these roads-at-all-costs arguments. The reason Toronto has a lot of traffic is that it's an extremely desirable place to live and work. One of the main reasons for that desirability is that we never ripped apart neighbourhoods with freeways. You want easy driving? Check out Buffalo. They've got all the empty lanes you could ever want.
Also, there's always a bite-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face element to a lot of these roads-at-all-costs arguments. The reason Toronto has a lot of traffic is that it's an extremely desirable place to live and work. One of the main reasons for that desirability is that we never ripped apart neighbourhoods with freeways. You want easy driving? Check out Buffalo. They've got all the empty lanes you could ever want.
adma
Superstar
In 1971, Premier Davis "obeyed the people"
H
Hydrogen
Guest
Don't worry; they plan to build an off ramp.
While Toronto has traffic problems, it's hardly a "transportation fiasco." It's quite clear that any plan to remove portions of the Gardiner will require careful study. It's also clear that keeping the Gardiner would simply help maintain the status quo - which some people have already referred to as a state of "fiasco."
Either way, the roadway in question will not be eliminated, it will just be changed.
MisterF
Senior Member
Only 40% of downtown workers drive, and 10% take the Gardiner. That doesn't include pedestrians and cyclists. The number of cars downtown is steady while transit ridership is increasing.
Dichotomy
Banned
Yeah, let's drag out the tired old ' European cities this, European cities that' argument. This is not Europe.
For your uninformed information, if you look at either side of Bloor-Danforth, for example, one side was torn down and demolished in the past 75 years: the city could have the cajones in those days to 'set back' the property line 4 or 5 meters at that juncture and allowed for the street to have been '6-laned' Vancouver did. Hamilton did. Sao Paulo did. Silly Hall dropped the ball in the '20s and '30s and only woke up in the '40s when they laid out the freeway map to undo the damage done by previous councils criminal negligence, or just plain laziness. Take your pick.
Toronto is a tiny blip on the world stage. Three million doesn't even rank it in the top 50 cities in the world, yet we go off comparing ourselves to New York, L.A., London - whatever city suits the socialist cause du jour. Get a grip.
I"ve never travelled in a city with such horrible subways and traffic. We are becoming a joke. We have 'world class' problems in this city, yet the solutions are straight from Midland or Lindsay.
And don't get me started on Davis cancelling the Spadina: who, exactly, was he obeying? Have any of you sat through council meetings? Who sits in the public gallery? It is the same usual suspects, clamoring and breying for their version of utopia. Sorry, but the rest of us have jobs and don't have time to show up with placards.
This is going to be an election issue. I will personally see to it. When I chat up other dog people in Riverdale, most are aghast at the way this city is run, but they just shrug it off.
Miller has to go. Someone has to stand up to him and his sycophants.
I do not expect you to agree with this Dichotomy - but I don't think the other dog walkers you run into are shrugging "it" off - I think they are shrugging you off. If most people agreed with you, this forum would be full of messages like yours, yet it isn't. The vast majority of people do not agree with your extreme position.
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Whoaccio
Senior Member
To be inoffensive, I do not want to live in Hamilton. Many Torontonians agree, hence why they live in Toronto and not Hamilton. Sao Paulo? You drag on about how tiny Toronto is by global standards and how we shouldn't compare ourselves to Europe, but then compare us to a city with 20m people?
You are seriously blaming politicians in the 1920s for the current state of Toronto's traffic? Toronto was like 50,000 people back then. What idiotic city would lay out a freeway plan for a village?
But comparing us to Sao Paulo, a city of 20m, is cricket. Whatever suits you're cause du jour, i guess.
Dichotomy
Banned
First off, Toronto's population surpassed 100,000 at the turn of the last century. By the 1920s it was approaching half a million.
Secondly, Vancouver's east end was built in the '30s, yet they somehow managed to anticipate future growth and laid out Kingsway, Hastings, Naniamo, Renforth and others as 6 lanes, not the pathetic 4 lanes that we see in all of Toronto's major streets. Explain that. Vancouver is the tree-hugging, broccoli-eating, save-the-whale center of the Universe, but their traffic flows better than ours (well, except for those blasted bridges, but then the tree huggers shut down the Lion's Gate widening, too).
I repeat from an earlier post I did:
The Toronto bleeding Star's own figures: 76% DRIVE to work
16% TTC
6% walk or cycle
This is a democracy. Supposedly. The people have voted. Deal with it.
Save the snide remarks about my fellow dog walkers. I am a savvy enough debater to remain neutral and let them take the lead.
And I would wager most of the people that haunt blogger sites like these are the same who bother to show up to the Mayor's touchy, feely round table discussions and come up with all those feel good slogans that make this city so much better to live in.
Secondly, Vancouver's east end was built in the '30s, yet they somehow managed to anticipate future growth and laid out Kingsway, Hastings, Naniamo, Renforth and others as 6 lanes, not the pathetic 4 lanes that we see in all of Toronto's major streets. Explain that. Vancouver is the tree-hugging, broccoli-eating, save-the-whale center of the Universe, but their traffic flows better than ours (well, except for those blasted bridges, but then the tree huggers shut down the Lion's Gate widening, too).
I repeat from an earlier post I did:
The Toronto bleeding Star's own figures: 76% DRIVE to work
16% TTC
6% walk or cycle
This is a democracy. Supposedly. The people have voted. Deal with it.
Save the snide remarks about my fellow dog walkers. I am a savvy enough debater to remain neutral and let them take the lead.
And I would wager most of the people that haunt blogger sites like these are the same who bother to show up to the Mayor's touchy, feely round table discussions and come up with all those feel good slogans that make this city so much better to live in.
CityPlaceN1
Senior Member
I'd wager 95% of Urban Toronto are quite excited when a new 50 storey building is announced. That turns to pandemonium when an 80 storey building is announced. Hardly the touchy feely crowd.
smuncky
Senior Member
too bad we don't have something like this at yonge and bloor. where were the planners?!
