Comment 95729

By Noted (anonymous) | Posted December 09, 2013 at 09:34:27

Consider the Toronto transportation department; it continues to apply policies that favour vehicular traffic above everything else, unaware of the fact that the city has turned into something entirely different, something its policies no longer support. Indeed, our transportation facilitators are now part of the problem, not the solution.

This is evident throughout the city, where the battle between cars and trucks and everything else rages more fiercely than ever.

Are our streets good for anything more than driving? If they’re not, then it’s time to change that or accept as inevitable that Toronto faces a future as a second-rate city of little consequence to the wider world. This won’t be just because of the design and organization of our streets, but because they are symptomatic of a larger mindset, a mindset that resists change and clings to outdated notions that have no place in the 21st century.

Toronto’s reluctance to install something as simple as a pedestrian crossing speaks of the larger failure to grasp at the most basic level what a city is. From the half mayor down, we live in a state of collective denial; at this point, it’s not clear we even want to be a city.

Instead, it seems many of us would rather exist in some kind of indeterminate suburban condition moving constantly between boxes — domestic, commercial or corporate, big or small — cut off from a world that has grown scary to too many Torontonians.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/12/09/are_toronto_streets_good_for_anything_more_than_driving_hume.html#

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