Quote:
Originally Posted by lrt's friend
I am in a quandary on who to vote for in this election. I guess I am too idealistic. We get certain piecemeal ideas but no truly overall vision to make Ottawa a better place. Or, we just get very vague suggestions, with no specifics on what might make Ottawa better. I will 'fix' transit, which comes across with other aspects of the platform as, I will change transit but that involves further service cuts.
I live in the suburbs but inside the Greenbelt, but I still see suburbs being designed only for cars. It has not been getting better. The suburbs are our future and intensification cannot provide the full solution. So, we need better suburbs, but I listen to the crickets. We really offer nothing beyond car infrastructure. I look at how we build new subdivisions, and I cringe. Findlay Creek is south of me, and while the neighbourhood is not bad in itself, the connections to the city have not been significantly improved since the 1950s although the population is exploding.
We are improving the density of our newer suburbs, but all we have done is build for denser traffic at the same time. No decent alternatives for decades. Finally, we will get a poorly designed Trillium Line that is west of Findlay Creek, and not really within decent walking distance of anybody in Findlay Creek and a lousy bus connection. When the Findlay Creek subdivision was planned, the planners said that a 30 minute bus was all that was needed. A self-fulfilling prophesy of transit failure. In parts of Findlay Creek today, it is over 1 km walk to all day transit service. Guaranteed failure.
If we want better suburbs, we need rapid transit to be built to be competitive with car travel and much earlier instead of waiting for decades. We also need a safe cycling route into the city.
This is a major objection towards Tewin. We approve it without alternative transportation corridors and depend entirely on existing roads. No new suburb should be built without alternative transportation as part of the plan and it should be built early as a condition for approval. Otherwise, it is just the same old ideas again, perhaps worse.
I look at intensification proposals and worry. I am not opposed to intensification and there are many opportunities, but when we want widespread intensification, we can ruin some of our best neighbourhoods. I drove down Sherwood Drive yesterday, and loved the well treed and landscaped lots. What a shame if we pave this over. Sure, it is low density. We need to focus on derelict and empty properties away from our best neighbourhoods. There are plenty of opportunities.
Building a better Ottawa is what I want, including better suburbs, better transportation routes and intensification where it makes sense. Nobody really speaks to me about this.
Convince me otherwise.
|
I agree completely. I, too, have not found a Mayoral candidate that is voicing any real positive change in the city’s direction.
The ‘radical’ idea of borrowing money to dramatically speed up construction of bike infrastructure is really nothing new. The bike lanes are already planned. It is simply changing the speed at which some of them will get built. We did the same thing for transit when we borrowed to extend the Confederation line (so that it, too, could become more useful). We could have built out one stop at a time, over many years, but the city chose to borrow money to extend it East, South, and West, all at once.
Unfortunately, borrowing so much to construct Stage 2 means that there is no capacity to do any other transit infrastructure projects for many years. Think of how the Baseline BRT has been pushed off for many years because of a lack of funds. This is likely to also happen with future bicycling infrastructure.
Yes, I know that most of the candidates have made many ‘promises’ during the campaign; and that accelerating the spending on bike lanes is only one. However, I’m having a hard time finding any solid planks in the platforms.
Statements like “I will end homelessness within the four-year term.” Or “I will go through the budget, line-by-line, and find ‘efficiencies.” are just not credible because they are so nebulous.
And then there is the question of whether the new Council will even allow the new Mayor to do the things that they would like to do.
At best, the ideas presented by the mayoral candidates simply give an indication of what is important to that person. Whether a person who comes across as believing that the city needs to go all-in to fight the ‘Climate Crisis’ as fast as possible, while being a ‘White Knight’ to the down-trodden, by spending everyone else’s money on them; or someone who believes that people working at and for city hall can just work a bit harder so that more can be done with less; is what it boils down to for me.
At this point, I still have not been convinced as to which will do the least damage to the city overall. Neither of the front runners has, in my opinion, a solid plan to actually set the city on a path of betterment.
Threaded Mode