Comment 93568

By H+H (registered) - website | Posted October 23, 2013 at 11:59:33 in reply to Comment 93561

Matthew, I take your point about the risk of conflating timidity and incrementalism. They aren't the same thing.

The point I was trying to make was that timidity can lead to incrementalism. Timidity is a feeling or an emotional condition. Incrementalism is the comfortable action that timidity too often engenders. In my view, too often this has been the case in Hamilton. A feeling of timidity (perhaps triggered by a concern about re-election or worse, believing, as did Death of a Salesman's Willy Loman, that the goal in life is to be well-liked) causes support for half-steps or less. Tom Jackson's "exit ramp" term, which he uses with shocking frequency, is perhaps the best local example that illustrates my point.

I acknowledge that if the change is gigantic in scope and potential impact, even bold thinkers may have to accept incremental change as the path forward. But, when the change is a bike lane, I think wasting time breaking the change into incremental steps is absurd.

gcrawford

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