I’m no defender of Ford – I loathe the guy and only wish him well on a humanitarian basis – and I believe that if you add up all the numbers, he hasn’t had much net impact on the city budget despite his claims of supposedly saving hundreds of millions.
But I have no idea what that statement of yours is supposed to refer to. There is no Scarborough subway, and the cancellation of the Scarborough LRT extension incurred minimal cost. The entire Sheppard subway line cost around $1 billion, and was completed long before Ford ever assumed office. So, again, I loathe the guy, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Yes, he has a wife. Cite: repeated domestic assault calls to the police over the years concerning him and his wife (including one that interrupted a police drug sting against one of his friends), not to mention his announcing to the press that his getting “more than enough to eat at home” was proof that he had no harassed a staffer by telling the staffer that he wanted to eat the staffer. So yes, he has a wife, although one has to wonder why.
The cancellation of the LRT sets Toronto back about 80 million. Changing the SRT to subway, instead of the fully funded LRT, will cost and extra 1 to 1.2 billion dollars. This is before the additional operating costs of using heavy rail instead of light rail (the LRT easily handles the next 30 years of capacity). So, yeah, 1.2 billion.
His claim is that he has saved one billion dollars. Sometimes, only 800 million. While neither of those numbers is true, there have been savings (although, if you use the same math Ford has, Miller saved the city considerably more).
Ford tends to point solely to property taxes, and ignore his increases in user fees, when making his tax claims, making it hard to determine exactly how much he has cost the city.
I did not say I wished him death, but no, I don’t wish him well. First, yes, he has a wife and kids - I believe there have been more than Two dozen calls. Rumor is that his kids may have been placed in the care of their grandparents by CAS.
I think I’d probably avoid the “but he’s got a family” rebuttal when talking about Ford.
Ford’s term, from the Don Cherry speech to, well, last week, has been marked by him threatening or attacking people he didn’t like. He has picked a fight with about 70% of the city; from his blustering “You’ve just attacked Kuwait” to knocking over a councillor (Pam McDonnel), to his brother talking about throwing hand grenades at a political opponent or throwing his fellow councillors off the roof of city hall.
So, yeah, it’s sort of a live by the sword/die by the sword kind of thing. If I threatened you everyday, I don’t know that you would be “sad” if, when I contracted a disease, you didn’t care at all one way or another.
Quoting the cost of building a proposed future subway line as money “thrown away” has to be one of the silliest argumentative tactics I’ve ever heard – especially considering that the subway would be primarily paid for by the federal and provincial governments.
The fact is that as much as I loathe Ford (have I said that often enough yet? ;)) and his brother, too, expanding the subway system is one of the very few things he’s actually right about. Toronto’s subway system is pathetic for a city of its size and growth rate. And you don’t have to look to the sprawling subway systems of New York, Paris, or London to understand this – you have only to look to the magnificent subway system in Montreal, which has barely more than half of Toronto’s population in the core municipal area, and which has subway lines running almost everywhere.
Toronto’s city council is beset by a Mickey Mouse mentality where “light transit” is a stupid euphemism for “street car” (not the Scarborough LRT which is a real train, but usually). The two-pronged strategy of failing to extend the subway system and failing to build freeways has left the city with the worst of both worlds, neither effective rapid transit nor an effective freeway system. The section of 401 running over the top of Toronto has the dubious distinction of being the busiest and most congested highway in all of North America. Billions of dollars are wasted in lost productivity every year as cars sit idling all over the city in what are basically parking lots.
Toronto has always needed leadership not afraid to think big, like Montreal had when they built their first subway system (which was larger than Toronto’s from day 1) and attracted the world to Expo 67 – which incidentally was reached by a long subway ride that ran under the river to Île Sainte-Hélène, where the present Jean Drapeau station is named after him, and then all the way to Longueuil on the mainland. Too bad the first such Toronto mayor turned out to be an underachieving alcoholic drug-addicted boor.
No. The LRT started. The LRT stopped. There were cancellation fees. Those fees are about 80 million dollars.
All of this (the size of the subway, comparisons to cities 3 times the size and density of Toronto) may be true, but have nothing to do with the Scarborough subway. Transit ought to be covered with the most effective form of transportation for the proposed load. LRT (and the Danforth extension will run in a ROW, not in traffic) more than handles any proposed load for the next 50 years. If you have an estimate from anywhere that supports a level of PPHPD that LRT cannot support, feel free to post it.
LRT vs. Subway is not about “thinking big”, or about loading standards. It is about Scarborough being convinced they are forgotten because no one builds anything in Scarborough.
From every perspective; technical, financial, ease of use, sociological, the Scarborough subway (as opposed to the proposed LRT replacement) is a very bad move. It serves fewer people, is less accessible (3 stops vs 7 stops) and is amazingly more expensive (1.2 billion dollars).
Spending an extra 1.2 billion dollars to provide less service is the silliest argument I’ve ever heard.
I don’t see where I said it was “thrown away”. Perhaps you can provide a cite for me saying that? Or explain why you put it in quotes?
The LRT would be completely paid for by the provincial governments. A subway, which will be accessible to fewer people, will have the extra, and all of the operating costs, paid for by the City of Toronto. That’s 1.2 billion and all the operating costs.
Yeah, we need more subways. So let’s talk about where to put those. Through low-density, established areas ain’t the right place for it. And blowing 1.2 billion on it? That cripples the ability to create ones in the correct place; places where there would be growth, and where more people could use it.
I said in my very first post on this that there were cancellation fees involved, but that they were minimal. Probably more like $85 million, which indeed is a drop in the bucket relative to the cost of building either the LRT or the subway.
Right, just ignore the fact that most of what I talked about there was about Montreal – as I said, barely more than half of Toronto’s population in the core municipality, and with a magnificent subway system that is due not only to a visionary like Drapeau, but to many other leaders who have broadly extended it over the years.
Depends on the scope of one’s vision. Another POV is that a unified system with subways as the default should be the primary design center, with traffic and population studies only determining where the subways are built. Otherwise you end up justifying street cars, preferably drawn by horses to avoid the costs of stringing electrical lines.
Subways are the default backbone (and, for the record, the extension into Vaughan was also a bad idea). And one does need to be built, the dreaded Relief Line, to relieve the Bloor/Yonge exchange (and yeah, that’s going to have 20k ppdph and should be heavy rail, even all the way to at least Eglinton, and I’d go to Don Mills (or York Mills - I get them confused. To that mall).
But, really, the tunnelled portion of the Eglinton Crosstown and the Scarborough LRT don’t magically become horse drawn street cars just because they are fed from an overhead wire and use lighter gauge rails. They are both grade separated (Eglinton all the way out to Don Mills, anyway). And, frankly, I took the St. Clair Disaster today, and which isn’t grade separated but does have an exclusive ROW, and it moves a lot of people very quickly. The Scarborough LRT would be substantially better than that. A subway is ridiculous overkill, for no reason other than to be able to say “subway”.
I will agree with you that Toronto needs to think more boldly (I would counter that using the LRTs is bold thinking, especially the other lines). But, if that’s true, if one is invested in City building, then Ford (either one) remains the worst candidate, since he is the epitome of “Toronto Cheap”, with nothing other than an emphasis on saving money on taxes. That needs to be reiterated: he does not have a plan to pay for that subway. At all. He has lied about the numbers repeatedly.
Okay, that is a totally fair statement (I tried to edit to catch it). Too often people compare Toronto to Paris and NY, and miss the density difference. I jumped the gun there, and I apologize.
The problem there is, traffic studies would absolutely argue against the extension of the Bloor/Danforth line* as a subway. The traffic just isn’t there. I don’t think you could manage it with horse drawn street cars (although admittedly, with healthy horses, that might be more reliable than the SRT).
for those confused about my ever changing terminology:
There is a long subway line that runs east-west across Toronto. This is referred to as “The Bloor Line” (because it runs next to Bloor), the “Bloor/Danforth line” (because Bloor becomes the Danforth when it crosses the Don River), or “Line 2” (because reasons). It goes out a piece, and then riders transfer to the “Scarborough Rapid Transit Line” (the SRT). The SRT was a bad idea brought about by provincial meddling, and it pisses off just about everyone. The plan was to replace it with an LRT, running on the same route. Then the plan was to replace it with an extension to the Bloor/Bloor\Danforth/Line 2 line, using HRT - that is, to extend the subway. Now the plan is LRT. Probably.
Sorry, the current plan is a subway, because the Liberals wanted to buy votes in Scarborough, and it is likely to remain that, since the Province is peeved at City Council for tearing up the plans repeatedly.
The article states that he’s undergone a lung biopsy (which I assume was a needle biopsy of a mass/nodule in his lung, i.e. a minor procedure done under local anesthetic).
Of far greater significance is the implication that there’s also tumour in his lung and, if so, presumably from metastatic spread of whatever’s in his belly.
Hospital press conference at 5:00 PM tomorrow (Wednesday).
So now I’m starting to feel bad for the guy, and his brother is so overwrought that he hasn’t started campaigning yet.
Which leads me to ruminate about the political impact of all this. If the guy has a life-threatening illness it’s going to be hard to criticize his policies and behaviors as they deserve to be criticized without seeming to be insensitive, and his brother may get a political boost out of this that carries him right into the mayor’s office.
