OneCity
Senior Member
Miller and the left has been out of power for ten years now. The leaders that came after had plenty of time to move forward on the relief line and let the transit city projects run its course without the need for interference. They had an entire decade to get it started, and to prove that their overall management of the city was better than Miller's. An entire decade, and what do they have to show for it? Absolutely nothing.
So when will people like you finally give some due credit where it truly belongs? For starters,
- The cowardice of the Wynne government in rejecting dedicated revenue tools has forever ensured that money for transit will be scarce, bitterly fought for and stretched thin between competing priorities in every budget/election cycle. We will continue to fight over which badly-needed line gets to happen first and which ones will be left to our grandkids to deal with, but it didn't have to be this way.
- Transit City was never intended to take this long to be done and over with. But the Liberals allowed every line to be reduced in scope, delayed by many years, or eventually cancelled. Contrary to popular belief, Rob Ford never had the authority to unilaterally tear up transit plans without a council vote. Everything that he did was done with the blessing of the Liberals, and later made worse by city council's inability to stick to a transit plan for more than a few months.
- Miller's priorities was not downtown-centric enough for you, but his successor ran on an anti-downtown platform and consumed all his political capital on suburban subway expansion. Then John Tory ran on SmartTrack which nobody asked for, attacked the business case for the relief line, diverted city resources from the planning work on the RL, and has now lost control of the whole thing to Doug Ford.
- For a long time the TTC insisted that we didn't need the relief line thanks to ATC and new trains, while at Metrolinx the relief line was only a 25 year priority under the original Big Move plan. If the need for a relief line was so obvious back then, then maybe the technocrats should have given better advice to their political overlords.
Millers tenure and transit plan was the cause, the aftermath was the effect.
Thankfully we will never see a political uprising of this magnitude with transit planning at the forefront again.
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