His references are from wikipedia. What more is there to say?
His references are from wikipedia. What more is there to say?
I'll tell you what more there is to say. The final nail to shut this rotten coffin, before we throw it out to sea...
Cities in Europe and Asia invest heavily in their mass transit, especially subway lines. A city of Toronto's size, if in Europe, would almost surely have a much bigger subway system.
The thing is that the federal governments there finance these projects to a much greater extent. The city is not abandoned to do stuff itself. Sure, the federal governments helps toronto, but if this was say china, we would see the federal government financing 3 new lines all at the same time.
We need to seriously compare Toronto to these european and asian cities.
Especially asian. Heck, when comparing european metro systems we can clearly see that we lag behind. Comparing to asian ones shows that we are really really behind.
South Korea's Daegau subway for example was opened in 1997 and is almost as big as toronto's. India's delhi metro, opened in 2002 is already larger than toronto's.
All this big construction, from Russia, to China, to India, to South Korea, to Germany, to Italy, to France, to Spain, and beyond, has been mainly financed by the federal government.
It's all a matter of money. We are not good financially, so the solution is stupid short term solutions... which will end up costing more in the long run, as has happened in serbia's messed up capital.
To slap the reagan and thatcher fans - the private sector and free market is the one that always fails. This is because of the greed to make more and more profits.
But back to reality - the private sector is necessary. However, this idea that the private sector knows best and should always control everything is fucked up paranoia.
It is a conspiracy really. The mayor of Cleveland I believe opposed the privatization of the electric company. As a result financial sector retaliated to punish him. The result, the city was in financial shit, but electricity was more available than in cities which privatized things. This is especially evident in the third world where water gets privatized... costs go up and people end up rioting. No thanks. Fuck the private sector for these kind of "vital" things.
) but I think it's justified to axe a few services. If you run a bus through a route that gets an atrociously low ridership, I think it's quite right to axe that service completely. It reaches a point that it becomes unsustainable. Not a lot of people use the service, and so service has to be cut back. Still not a lot use it because it's inconvenient, so maybe it just won't work in that corridor.
