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Toronto Eglinton Line 5 | ?m | ?s | Metrolinx | Arcadis

Don't you feel a bit extreme, spider, in equating providing bike lanes with returning to living in caves? The idea of progress changes. If you're 79 you would have grown up when the car was king. A&Ws, American Graffiti, up and down Main St, all that. But the Model T is closer to your time than the Pinto or the Gremlin or the Pacer is to someone now in their 20s. In your day the mass produced car had been around for about as long as the desktop computer has been today. Progress now isn't more and more space for cars, growing further and further out, it's learning to moderate the impacts (not just of cars but of many things that half a century ago promised a bright future). Eglinton Connects isn't banning the car. It's providing options. It's making the street more inviting for people.
 
andrewpmk said:
If Toronto continues to be one of the fastest growing cities in the world, then Eglinton will be a complete mess. If a few decades from now there are tall buildings all along Eglinton, the LRT will be severely overcrowded. Narrowing Eglinton to 1 lane will make it look like the mess that is Yonge/Bloor (caused by the "pedestrian scrambles" at Yonge/Bloor and Bay/Bloor) and it will be severely gridlocked at all hours of the day, while the bike lane is hilariously underused. Of course, we don't know whether Toronto will grow as fast as it has in the past, because the combination of Toronto's high unemployment rate, terrible traffic and outrageous housing prices might just cause Alberta to grow much more quickly than Toronto. If building partially elevated rail only costs slightly more than LRT and carries twice as many people, why not build elevated rail?
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It's amazing how you don't even give bike infrastructure a chance when it has worked for so many other cities. It's a separated, safe bike lane, not some line on a road. People will definitely use it, just like how all other bike infrastructure in this city (as well as other cities) ends up being used by cyclists.

As for everything else you said, I don't really know if you're being serious anymore.
 
I really wish we didn't get these obnoxious notifications whenever someone we've marked as ignored makes a posts in a thread. Also doesn't help that we can see what they write when someone quotes them. Kind of defeats the purpose of the ignore functionality.
 
Don't you love it when some earnest young fellow, maybe not even old enough to vote, takes time out of his busy day to explain the ways of the world as he knows them to be. I am patient and grateful for his efforts but unlike him I have been here before, several times.

My two oldest children are now in their fifties and do you know what, they knew everything you know 30 years before you were born and were not the least bit shy about sharing their prescient insights with their good old Dad in a gentle but condescending manner.

They graduated from High School, got a job and moved into their own digs south of the tree line (Bloor Street). Travelled on transit since owning a car was simply beyond the pale and in one case bought and rode an insanely expensive bicycle. They enjoyed their little world until it became tiresome even to them.

Fast forward a few years and they own and drive cars and live in condos. You too can be saved, patience is the word.
 
Let's count how many car advertisements you see.

Let's count how many bicycle advertisements you see.

Car advertisements outnumber bicycle advertisements approximately 20 to 1. On television and in cinemas, that becomes approximately 100 to 1.

To wage the war on cars, one must ban car commercials. That is much easier (and much cheaper) to do than it is to install bollards, repaint lanes, and paying car crash victims. It helps reduce the appeal of cars. Oh, and Pixar should create a film called "Bikes," because "Cars" is creating a demand for private motor vehicles for a new generation, which is very counterproductive. Oh, and car commercials are not good for spendthrifts who don't know what a budget is.
 
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Johnny Au said:
Let's count how many car advertisements you see.

Let's count how many bicycle advertisements you see.

Car advertisements outnumber bicycle advertisements approximately 20 to 1. On television and in cinemas, that becomes approximately 100 to 1.

To wage the war on cars, one must ban car commercials. That is much easier (and much cheaper) to do than it is to install bollards, repaint lanes, and paying car crash victims. It helps reduce the appeal of cars. Oh, and Pixar should create a film called "Bikes," because "Cars" is creating a demand for private motor vehicles for a new generation, which is very counterproductive. Oh, and car commercials are not good for spendthrifts who don't know what a budget is.
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I'd rather see "(Street)cars", an adorably animated re-telling of the fight to save Toronto's streetcar system in the 1970s. Hear that Pixar? New moneymaker right here.
 
andrewpmk said:
It looks like you can look up how many people ride a bike to work on Statistics Canada by riding (2011 voluntary long form census, so probably not that accurate, look for "NHS Profiles"). It's only 2.1% in Toronto but 7.8% in Trinity-Spadina, and 2.4% in St. Paul's (the riding where most of the Yonge/Eglinton area is located in). It seems like this number is unusually high in a few NDP ridings where Olivia Chow will likely do well but very low elsewhere.
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Nothing comparable to traffic data, or TTC ridership figures, then.
 
spider said:
Don't you love it when some earnest young fellow, maybe not even old enough to vote,
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Nah, I'm old, like your sons. But sometimes I find it illuminating to think of how much my framework of what the modern world means differs from people born ten or so years before me and realize how that must mean that people younger than I also find things very real in my memory (Apollo 11, Watergate, Saturday morning cartoons, The Poseidon Adventure, going home for lunch, suntanning, cassette tapes, rotary dial phones) prehistoric. 9-11, so seared in our memories, happened before people soon to become teenagers were born. Cars were freedom and independence to you, they were the most fascinating technology happening. By my time they were beginning to become more of a burden, with the energy crisis and greater environmental awareness. Now for a young person to begin driving they need to pay thousands a year in insurance. Many, especially in urban areas, aren't interested. Things change. But you seem happy to feel that you won out over your sons. Score.
 
typezed said:
...Cars were freedom and independence to you, they were the most fascinating technology happening. By my time they were beginning to become more of a burden, with the energy crisis and greater environmental awareness. Now for a young person to begin driving they need to pay thousands a year in insurance. Many, especially in urban areas, aren't interested. Things change. But you seem happy to feel that you won out over your sons. Score.
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This is the exactly my experience. Cars ownership is no longer seen as some great accomplishment to aspire to in life. They're mere tools. I find thay only if young people will only get a car if they absolutely NEED it.

I'm a fairly young guy. Of all my friends in their mid twenties I know exactly two who have cars. Both of them are car enthusiasts. The rest of them seem content taking the TTC; even the ones who live ridiculously far from good rapid transit options.
 
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spider said:
Don't you love it when some earnest young fellow, maybe not even old enough to vote, takes time out of his busy day to explain the ways of the world as he knows them to be. I am patient and grateful for his efforts but unlike him I have been here before, several times.

My two oldest children are now in their fifties and do you know what, they knew everything you know 30 years before you were born and were not the least bit shy about sharing their prescient insights with their good old Dad in a gentle but condescending manner.
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Right, individuals change as they age. That doesn't mean they made the wrong choice when they were younger; they simply made different choices. The preaching probably wasn't necessary though.


That said, you must also be aware that there are and will always be others who are younger than their fifties who replaced your former 30 year old kids and may want to have that lifestyle for a decade or two; and when those people hit their fifties they too will be replaced by others who are younger who may want that lifestyle.

Infrastructure should cater to everybody using it, and that includes considering today's 10 to 15 year olds who will be 20 to 25 by the time Eglinton is done. Given the trends for downtown, there ought to be a very large number of 20 to 35 year olds living in the area at that time.


From a selfish point of view (and I don't ride a bike), I like cyclists because they keep the tax bills low. Moving a cyclist takes 1/10th the resources of a car driver and those are taxes I don't need to pay for roadway/parking/transit expansion. Really, cyclists are incredibly cheap to the city. Pedestrians are much the same.

Anything the city can do to move that modal split even 5% toward cycling and walking will save me thousands of dollars over my lifetime.
 
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WislaHD said:
The only reason I got a drivers license was so I could present ID at bars. :)
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Why not get Ontario Photo ID - https://www.ontario.ca/government/ontario-photo-card - which is what we used to do before they put photographs on driver's licences (though it was a different agency issuing them back then, I think ...).

Though perhaps if yours was from the USA, they ddin't have that there ...
 
nfitz said:
Fortunately we live in a city where the car is not essential. Just got the car back from the garage yesterday (alternator failed) and they had a list of about $1,500 in upcoming repairs (which isn't shocking after nothing major previously on 8-year old car). So it's time to play fix it or trade it.

Sadly i still need a car. Car sharing doesn't work with baby seats
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What do you mean - don't the cars used in car sharing have LATCH connectors?
 
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