Transit

     Elections as always so entertaining, its the one and only time politicians act like they are one of us. “citizens” its the one time that you will see a Prime Minister, Premiere or Mayor pretend to “connect” with the electing public. But after they have won they move into another realm, and that feeling as though politicians might actually relate to normal citizens vanish.

Looking back in history the people who lead us and achieved great things and produced results which over the long term benefited most of the people who put that person in power. These men and woman were always controversial, they almost always had a personal ambition to accomplish something and they would push for their beliefs even if it rubbed some other leaders or CEO's the wrong way. It was thinking like that which built the railway across Canada, saw a universal healthcare system built, built subways, and created the regional transit service known as GO. All the things i listed were not always popular, the idea of spending billions to lay a network of commuter rail lines across the GTA was seen as a wast of money, many thought that money would be better spent expanding our highways. And had the money been spent doing that very thing it would have been very popular with the public since construction of highways tend to move allot faster with results seen allot sooner then transit building.

But the premier knew that unless such a service was built future commuters would suffer due to a lack of public transit options. Sadly it seems like it has become more important to passiveie the public whom become enraged at the meer idea of taxes let alone increased taxes, that investment and expantion of our transit systems has been at a more or less halt for the past 20 years. And over that 20 years Toronto's population has gone up by over a million, and after amalgamation Toronto now had several new jurisdictions it was solely responsible for. Before 1998 If North York had poor public transit it was more seen as north york short coming but now the only body responsible is Toronto.

But even with the downloading of 5 municipality’s and an ever booming population Toronto saw no major expansion of subways or LRT construction, in fact the TTC provided less service overall in the 90's due to lack of funding. Plans were made but due to the short sighted actions of a Conservative government at the time plans to build a subway line along Eglinton ave. Were cancelled by queens park. The line itself had barely been dug out and had to be filled back in upon its termination. Toronto's next chance at some transit construction came in the form of then North York motivated Sheppard subway, which had this line been completed to its original plan would have been quite beneficial to Toronto and taken allot of the demand off the now over capacity Yonge line. Sheppard’ss original path was to start at Downsview station east to Finch following it s current path but past where it ends today tofinallyy terminate at theScarboroughh RT. This layout would have allowed people in the city’sss north end a rapid way downtown, it would have given aalternativeee tusing the yonge line and it would give people in Scarboroughh an alternative to getting downtown from the Bloor Danforth line. But in another shortsighted move of stupidity funding was slashed to the line and it was ordered to be cut back to what we see today. So my question is this, have the days of true political will and ambition passed us by? Have we become so cash strapped that massive capital projects are just not possible? Or are leaders to chicken shit of voter backlash from raised taxes and new revenue sources to fun a massive expansion of transit in the GTA. Because if we don’t act soon and put public transit ahead of the personal car we will be a victim of our own success, commercial transportation is held up in traffic delaying goods and stalling the economy, this while car after car sit idling on the 401 16 lanes wide with one person per car, as they sit there a commuter train passes an overpass moving at 100kph carrying 1500 passengers, and then a subway train emerges form the tunnel into open air carrying 1000 passenger and moving at 80kph, Now why are we still using cars?