Raise the Hammer

"What specific changes to the proposal would you suggest? How do you boost the case for regional connectivity? Is this a question of emphasis, or a fundamental question of design?"

I think it is partly a question of design, but more importantly, it is a question of emphasis.

If we are open to -examining- our city's core issues, it should lead us to re-articulating the emphasis, and thus design issues would naturally come into focus.

In attempting to shift thinking towards such emphasis, one must adopt Buckminster Fuller's trim tab principle - which essentially is about understanding the power of little efforts to effect big change.

This approach is imperative because not only are we in a perennial resource crunch cycle, but as mankind's many big decisions clearly show, we are more prone to making many huge mistakes especially when we deploy huge resources in attempts to bring big change.

While our city did lose its historical economic base like many cities, our city's core issue is that we have yet to develop a meaningful economic alternative that can carry its population upwards - equally. Our education/medical complex remarkable as it is, simply fails to spread prosperity broadly and equitably. This is not going to get any better in time, it will only get worse, and which will in turn increase the economic and social gaps in our city. Add to this the exponential growth of our service industry that is thriving on social experimentation of the disenfranchised, and we have the makings of a massive economic vortex that will suck in all the capital both human and financial, with much churning at the top and very little to show for, at the bottom.

Contrary to many who may defer, I believe as a community, we have lost the collective ability to reinvent ourselves in a decisive manner -- hence, I tend to look at the opportunity posed by "Metrolinx" as the only chance we may have in the coming decades to reinvent ourselves into a regional entity from a parochial collective.

I see the region's transit challenges and Metrolink's bold response, as an opportunity to re-connect Hamilton to "Mainland Ontario" and to the rest of the world - after decades of social, political and financial disconnects. This may be our only grand chance to decisively become an outward looking, and an outward thinking society.

Our social, political and financial issues cropped up only when we stopped pursuing the connectivity to the world. It may have been the hubris of the '70's & '80's that has come to define who we are today, but in the early 1890's, visitors from England called Hamilton the Birmingham of Canada - back when our transit systems metaphorically and literally if not seamlessly, connected our city to the world. Our thriving economy back then was a reflection of that connectivity.

In trying to sketch a local urban development renaissance out of an LRT transit system, the much larger economic benefits of a pervasively connected city to a region and to the world are totally lost.

A well connected region allows for rapid flow-thru of economic opportunities within its network of cities. As world markets consolidate into trading blocks & regions to gain efficiencies in production and sales, Ontario's Golden Horseshoe region has a similar potential. We will eventually come to be known as "Metropolitan Hamilton", as that is the only way cities grow in our times.

In isolation, an LRT may bring some change to the local real-estate sector, but that is not guaranteed in tough economic times. The efforts and resources required to bring such limited change in my opinion far outweighs the benefits of the projected outcome.

Our current B-Line scheme, although a phase of a larger plan is hyper local, for it fails to meaningfully connect our city's regional/global transportation assets. The future A-Line scheme attempts to connect some of the regional assets, but fails to understand the city's geography, and in doing so ends up recreating a brand new node that appears to connect to the region, but remains oblivious of the severe limitations of its off-centric location.

The region sees Hamilton as a 'train platform' and not a grand 'railway terminal'. This may be on account of real ridership numbers presently, but it is also because we have never offered the region a view of Hamilton that is much more than the mere sum of our parts.

Our fear of reinvention handicaps us. We ignore discussions on alternatives. Alternatives that could unlock ten billion dollars in our local economy, by deploying far less than the billion+ dollars of investment required for our LRT.

We tend to be comfortable with ideas that require huge efforts for marginal change. And because we believe that the change from such huge efforts ought to be massive, we fail to believe in the power of the trim tab.

I could offer you a design alternative for deep regional and international connectivity which could create a whole new local economy - a design which is the outcome of markedly different emphasis, but after publicly talking about it for over two years, it would amount to belabouring a point.