Here's to big thinkers. Today during Mayor Davis Miller's inaugural address to his fellow Torontonians, he shared his thoughts on transit:
We have a great transit system for a city of 1.5 million people. But Toronto is now home to 2.6 million - and that number is expected to grow in the coming decades.
We can't have all those people driving cars.
However, providing real transit alternatives is not easy or cheap.
With dedicated rights-of-way like the one on St. Clair, we can turn a streetcar into an above ground subway at about a tenth of the cost and bring rapid transit to all parts of the city in the process. To Northern Scarborough and Northern Etobicoke ... areas where residents have, for too long, relied on multiple bus transfers to do the most basic of things like getting to work or going shopping.
But that's just the beginning. We should be thinking big. That means working with other governments to develop a National Transit Strategy and with the GTTA to develop a region wide strategy, recognizing that Toronto, and the TTC, are at the core of this region's mobility.
Throughout the election campaign Miller made transit and bus right-of-ways one of his main talking points. However, Miller is trying to please both sides of the finance issue, and his rhetoric becomes taxing near the end of his bit on transit. Funny how he wants to think big to make a National Transit Strategy when he is cutting costs every way he can like putting transit rails right in the middle of traffic instead of underground where it can be out-of-the-way instead of a right-of-way.
CNW Group
