Dear Rob Ford: DIAF

[sabotabby]

Rob Ford is mayor starting today, and is already the worst mayor ever.





Transit City would have saved me hours of commuting a week. It would have given my kids better access to jobs and education. It would have made them less socially, culturally, and economically isolated from the downtown core.


The subway will not get built. Rob Ford's transit plan is about as realistic as if he'd just offered to buy everyone a pony.

I wish, oh, I wish, that there was one honest cop left in Toronto who could arrest this wife-beating, drug-addled son-of-a-bitch on one of his drunken joyrides. I wish his driver's license would be permanently suspended, dooming him to a lifetime of taking public transit with us plebes.

Die in all the fires, Mayor Ford.

Fuck.

Comments

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

The most charming thing about all this is that he ran on a platform of supposed fiscal responsibility, and yet he wants to shelve a much more affordable transit plan in favour of a stupidly expensive one, for, as far as I can see, no good reason other than his pathological hatred of anything that could conceivably steal a tiny bit of road space from the almighty car.

[sugarmommaless.livejournal.com]

what is a lane-mile?

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, it's the number of miles a road would be if you took all its lanes and stuck them together end-to-end. So a 3-mile 2-lane road has 6 lane miles.

[sugarmommaless.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That was very clear.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

What a fucking clod.

[torontoteacher.livejournal.com]

Such an idiot. Although there was an interesting comment this morning... something like "Yes, Rob Ford was elected on a mandate to build subways. David Miller was elected on a mandate to close the Island Airport. Sometimes reality interferes."

Hopefully someone at the provincial level will tell this blowhard to shut up and build Transit City already. Otherwise we'll be another decade behind.

[outcastspice.livejournal.com]

yes, that's awful.

[kellista.livejournal.com]

can it be the revolution now? :(

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

That doesn't make any sense. No sense at all. :(

[eppic.livejournal.com]

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

[cannibal-x.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I've been following this story too from here in Vancouver where it seems to be getting very little press. It makes me embarassed to be from Ontario.. When we fuck ourselves over, we do it big..

[ginny-t.livejournal.com]

I hate him so much. I'm so thoroughly disappointed in him and the people of Toronto. This is unbelievably selfish fuckery that is going to hurt the city for years. :(

Worse and worse: The proper address for a mayor is "your worship." The fuck I will!

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

The hurt the city for years part is the part that really hurts me. If it were just a matter of toughing it out through the next four years, that'd be bad, but tolerable. It's that it's taken years of study and planning and securing funding to make Transit City possible, and Transit City would make the city more accessible for so many people. Scrapping all that work in favour of some half-baked, exponentially more expensive, unfunded idea will put accessible, sustainable transit years behind. We don't need subways. We need rapid, mass transit that connects the former boroughs to each other and to the core. I really don't care whether that transit comes in the form of streetcars, subways, or zeppelins as long as it happens quickly, safely, and in a way that will allow as many people as possible to use it.

Also? It takes a lot more work to make subways universally accessible than it does rapid transit.

[ginny-t.livejournal.com]

I agree with you wholeheartedly. This is ego triumphing over logic and empathy. Accessibility doesn't seem to me to be high on Ford's list of priorities.

He ran on this platform of supposed fiscal responsibility, and the first thing he does is incur millions of dollars in penalties cancelling a contract that would've been good for the long-term health of the city and its citizens.

That is the opposite of responsibility, and it's so disheartening. :(

(Also, zeppelins!)

[misslynx.livejournal.com]

It wasn't the people of Toronto that elected him - it was the people of Etobicoke, Scarborough and North York. If you look at the map of which wards voted for whom, it's a near-perfect image of the original city of Toronto vs. the suburbs that go amalgamated onto it. :-/

[ginny-t.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, I've seen that map. It angers and disappoints me and illustrates just what a bad idea amalgamation was and remains.

However, even before that amalgamation, which took place long enough ago that it is the reality of some people's entire adult lifetimes, those boroughs-which-became cities were part of metropolitan Toronto--not entirely unrelated suburbs.

I apologise for being contentious, but I don't like this distinction; it implies a tier system of the people of the political entity of Toronto. I'm extremely uncomfortable with that.

[umadoshi.livejournal.com]

*shudders* Unbelievable.

[treehavn.livejournal.com]

Rob Ford's transit plan is about as realistic as if he'd just offered to buy everyone a pony.

The pony thing wouldn't happen - ponies would be viewed as a hostile action in the 'war on cars', getting in the road, taking up valuable SUV space.

God, I hate that man.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

As much as I don't like Gordon Campbell, nor the ex-mayor Sam Sullivan who oversaw the project... and despite all the bungling that was involved... and kindly set aside for a moment the fact that a very necessary transit line got shelved as a result of this being rammed onto TransLink's agenda...

There is something to be said for how Vancouver can promise they will have a new transit line, and have it operating in 4 years. Toronto is still debating transit corridors that were first proposed decades ago.

Or how Portland can approve a new transit line in 2006, lay down the new downtown tracks by summer 2007, start service in the autumn of 2009, and propose the *next* line in 2010.