Raise the Hammer

Hi, We’re right next door here, in Toronto. Visited us lately?

We have a public transit service that is more than often inadequate to move passengers during rush hour peaks. We've been using street cars since 1885, and our idea of upgrading them to the future is installing slightly different LRT vehicles they have been using in European streetcar systems for the last forty years.

Automobiles can't use the roads like they used to on the former six-lane St. Clair Avenue and Spadina Avenues where a streetcar ROW (Right Of Way) has been installed in a mistaken attempt to get the cars off the road and force people to take rapid transit. Instead, the number of sustainable technology automobile owners continues to grow, and the result is traffic chaos on those two streets that now provide a one-lane narrowed access for traffic. Business owners along those streets report a 35-50 per cent drop in business since the streets were so affected, and literally dozens of businesses have closed. Don't get me wrong...traffic is slowed to a crawl behind any streetcar on any of our streets, but thsoe street have been purposely narrowed for LRT ROW routes.

Our traffic light system only helps to move traffic on our two one-way streets: Adelaide and Richmond, and as the exception to the rule, sometimes early morning going east on Bloor Street West, where lights are timed, but this is the one exception, not the rule. Whenever we have events, they are invariably held in the downtown core and result in an up-to-two-hour departure time for people parked at them due to inadequate traffic planning.

Hamilton is the envy of Torontonians. No streetcars, (Yes, we know you sold all yours to us in the late 40's and early 50's and have been laughing at us ever since.) One-Way street systems that actually allow you to go from one end of the city to the other non-stop, (How cool is that!) A bus service that actually works, especially in the west end where four or five different destinations are serviced along the Main Street route. I have often visited Hamilton and never seen a sardine-crowded bus on those lines. By contrast, we here in Toronto have a social media campaign with pictures devoted to our rapid transit overcrowding called #TTCsardines, and a group calling itself the TTC Riders Group have awarded Glen Murray the Min of Transp. with the first "Sardine Award".

Currently, Main Street West has four to five lanes of smoothly flowing traffic, where taxi drivers have sworn to me there is never a traffic jam, and great rapid transit service where I have personally witnessed zero overcrowding and great destination service.

Beware, Hammertonians! Those of you who are promoting an LRT are promoting potential traffic chaos. The only people who will benefit by its installation are Mafia-controlled construction companies.

If you really want to get into the twenty-first century of rapid transit, look toward the PERT vehicular solution. Personal Electric Rapid Transit will get anyone there faster and cheaper than mass transit, and satellite control on surround-aware vehicles makes accidents almost impossible.

But if you want to go Neanderthal by adding your LRT system, you can save money by uncovering the rails that have been buried beneath the surface of the Main and King Streets (envied by Torontonians) for the past 70 years by city fathers who were much wiser than apparently the current crop of media-driven Mafia-rewarding bunch you have pushing for an LRT system today.

Comment edited by MarkState on 2014-05-03 12:03:04