Comment 42041

By jason (registered) | Posted June 16, 2010 at 13:37:19

Our belligerent approach to the AEGD is nothing new, as Jason's comment will attest.

Hamilton's suburban, traffic-obsessed elites spent fifty years clawing and scratching and grinding down the opposition until they finally got the highway they wanted running through the Red Hill Valley.

A few years later, it's safe to say that the highway has over-promised and under-delivered on the breathless claims of its supporters and apologists. We have Canada Bread, of course; and Sam Merulla wants the highway to take credit for the new hardware store in his ward.

We also have the vast, sprawling subdivisions that were the real motivation to build the highway, since the home building industry was the biggest political and financial supporter of the plan (some of its members going so far as to violate municipal election law to finance the campaigns of its champions).

And of course, it's clear in retrospect that the highway was never more than a glorified thoroughfare. The exits are too close together (almost like cross streets) and the ramps are too tight for trucks to navigate comfortably.

So much for the promise that the completed ring highway would take the trucks off our downtown streets. After all, if Red Hill was clogged with transport trucks, where would all the residential commuters go? You can be sure they would be hollering about the congestion.

The premise becomes even more ludicrous when you read the letter that Bernice Flegg, the president of the Hamilton Halton Home Builders Association, recently wrote to the Spectator. She decries the "irrational voice" of citizens who had the nerve to demand that the city take their residential neighbourhoods - neighbourhoods that were built a century ago and aren't much value to greenfield builders - off the truck route.

Flegg actually manages to conclude - presumably with a straight face - that making Hamilton the best place to raise a child entails choosing the convenience of transport trucks over the safety and livability of (some) residential neighbourhoods.

It turns out that intentions affect results. A highway built under the impetus of residential home builders is inevitably going to serve the goal of enabling residential home building, notwithstanding all the post-hoc reasoning in the world.

PLEASE send this to council and the Spec editors.

Comment edited by jason on 2010-06-16 12:38:29

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