kettal
Banned
Can they afford a 12-15 billion dollar purely LRT plan that proves to be ineffective at providing truly rapid transit in the city?
Building a transit system is like building a medieval cathedral. It starts with a plan and takes more than a generation to finish. Those cathedral, palaces and monuments would have turned out to be horrendous if they took only a decade and decided to pare away essential elements. Transit City in my books is doing exactly that: a mediocre rush job. They've responded to the "subway to every ward" cry with LRT to every ward. Neither is effective.
As for the impact on our progeny, I would venture to suggest that future generations will be damn grateful that we spent the money now when subways cost 300 million/km than when they have to build it at 1 billion/km in 20 years (if the current rate of inflation for construction projects holds). You will also note that the rate of inflation of construction projects is greater than prime and standard inflation combined. So from a strictly financial perspective, we would be better off going into debt to build as much infrastructure as possible today.
Future generations will be grateful that we spent 20 billion to do it right than 15 billion to do it so-so and leaving them with billions worth of work to do (to fill all of TC's gaps and flaws).
Are we grateful today for Mike Harris? It's looking more and more like 1995 again my friend. A premier who is running record deficits, and populace afraid of tax hikes.
I can guarantee you that Hudak will be pulling out the old scalpel.
I guess more stagnation will help future generations, right?