Raise the Hammer

Just because I think LRT is too expensive for Hamilton does not mean that I believe any forward thinking project will not work in Hamilton. I think Hamilton should make a really strong attempt to lure up and coming industries to the city maybe with subsidized rents and/or tax breaks. The two that pop into mind are wind and solar power generation. The cities network of bicycle lanes needs to be enlarged and combined this starting and stopping of bike lanes is silly and dangerous. I have seen that there are several Zellers stores in the area that have 2 wind turbines each. While in one of the stores I read a note on the wall that they produced 8,000 KWH the previous month. Why can we not mandate that every large store does the same? Or maybe even more. Why not 3 or 4 wind turbines per store? I read that one of the Walmart stores was renting their roofspace to a company to install a solar panel network. Why can we not mandate projects like that in Hamilton. If they want to build here than they need to abide by our demands.

I like the one way street network in Hamilton even though most of the regulars here do not. They improve traffic flow in a city that has some natural barriers to normal traffic dispersion tendencies. If I am in Toronto and whatever street I am on is very busy I can simply try one street north or south. In Hamilton there are limited east west streets below the hill and that hill causes an awfull lot of east west traffic. If the true issue is speed of the traffic on Main, King, Cannon and Wilson then simply change the timing to obtain a lower speed. I think a 5 KPH reduction would be a surprising change. The lights are currently set for a through speed of about 52 or 53 KPH. Change that to 46 or 47 KPH and lets see what the difference is in a year. Instead of simply charging home owners a charge to subsidize HSR I would like to see that be changed into a forced purchase of a monthly pass or two. The passes could be sold or used and might even convince a few new people to try transit that have never tried it before. Transit has so many problems in a spread out city like Hamilton we need some new and novel ways to fund it. Smaller buses are a must. Evening ridership is too low to keep these 40 seat monsters on the road. We need to get some small maybe 8 or 10 seaters to be running on a lot of the lines in the evenings. significant. The large buses would last longer since they would get less wear and tear while the fuel consumption goes down.

The list goes on, there are lots of things that we can do to get meaningful change in this city. Just because I believe that LRT is to expensive for us please do not try and paint me with a regressive minded brush. I have raised real concerns about LRT in this city and by and large they have been poo pooed. To the point that some have tried to compare the population of Hamilton to St. Louis. Come on lets be a little real here. I know that you are passionate about LRT but just maybe you are a little misguided. A billion dollar project is something that can haunt us for an awful long time. Especially when there are so many other things we can do for a lot less money.