Talk:Municipal expressways in Toronto

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"As an alternative to road construction, the city and province have made efforts to expand the TTC services within the core and expand GO Transit commuter train service. However, the costly efforts have not paid off; TTC ridership has declined since the 1980s while GO has failed to relieve congestion, pointing to a continual trend of growing car ownership.

"The debate continues to this day about the merits of the cancelled expressways. Highway advocates, including industry and suburban commuters, believe in the necessity of the expressways to meet growing demand from suburban growth and automobile traffic between suburbs and the downtown core. Urban reformers (most notably the late Jane Jacobs) and other residents of the core are opposed to expansion because of the air pollution, noise and health effects allegedly associated with expressways.

"The Canadian Automobile Association has proposed a plan of expansion within the City borders to address the congestion. This included the building of a new Scarborough Expressway through a route over Lake Ontario, new expressways and arterial roads and the building of the Richview Expressway. The City government has not been receptive and is focussed instead on transit alternatives.

"A new citizen group called the Citizens' Transportation Alliance of Greater Toronto, based in Scarborough, Ontario, is advocating for a return to balanced transportation planning in Toronto. It supports construction of new subways, but also endorses the construction of one new expressway to the northwest of Toronto, most likely an upgrade of Black Creek Drive, and one expressway to the east through Scarborough, along a hydro corridor or an upgrade of Kingston Road. The group also supports filling in arterial road missing links."

Goodness me! The car advocates of the Sam-Cass Club never stop, do they?! These skewed assertions demand fact checking and more balanced wording. 1.The people of Toronto (i.e. the electorate) were not for once over-ruled by the province in the decision to halt expressway construction. Sam Cass and the car lobby were well-represented in the old Metro level of government; unfortunately Metro was a completely unelected level of government. All positions to the old Metro government (except in its final years) were appointments. 2.The debate is dead because the lands reserved for the expressways proposed in the 50s have largely been sold off. The only land left to build on is municipally-owned park land. 3.Although general TTC ridership is down, trains and buses in Toronto now commonly run at over-capacity, particularly at rush hour. Ridership has not returned to its old levels at least partly because there are fewer buses and trains and no space left for people to cram on board the vehicles. 4.The CAA and this completely unheard-of bunch, the CTA, should present their proposals at election time if they are so representative of the people of the City of Toronto. Wikipedia is really not the place for them to present their uncorroborated press releases without so much as a link to their website. Otherwise it should be assumed that the initiatives they propose are intended to benefit suburbanites from outside the City proper. And, of course, more highways would benefit the auto industry, which is one of the last big manufacturing industries left in Southern Ontario and which is the great unseen lobbyist in the periodic revival of this debate.

One of the unique characteristics of the municipally-owned highways in the City of Toronto is that they are owned by the city: not the provincial or the federal governments (or the state and federal governments in the U.S. context). We the people whose houses are threatened with being knocked down, whose neighbourhoods are threatened with the despoilation of noise, soot and carcinogens, and we who lay awake at night listening to our children cough with their cases of infantile asthma (as is the case in my home), we elect (or unelect) the people who make the decisions regarding highway construction. Why should we destroy our neighbourhoods so that some lumpen pick-up driver can get home to Pickering or Mississauga faster?! Municipal ownership of the highways is a uniquely democratic strength of life in Toronto.

-Uncle Bobby