Some think the Toronto Star is liberal. It is not. The Toronto Star is elitist and its founder, poor old Joe Atkinson, is spinning in his grave. In coming out of the closet to support toll roads, the Toronto Star proved itself narrow in scope, elitist by nature and self-serving by design. The Toronto Star wants what is best for the Toronto Star.
To stretch the imagination, the editorial writers at the Star say that we are currently using the public highways around the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for free. They choose to ignore that we paid to build those highways ten times over with our gasoline taxes, that we could maintain them much better if the engineers just had better access to the pool of money created by our gasoline taxes and we could build more subways and bus lanes if our gasoline taxes were used for that purpose.
The need is not for toll roads as such. What we do need is commercial-only roads. These routes would be used to move trucks, vans and specialized equipment to where they are needed. We need to deliver the goods and services that keep our cities moving, fed, clothed and entertained. It would save us millions of dollars every day in the cost of getting goods and services to where they are needed. The Toronto Star might even find these commercial–only routes useful to deliver a more up-to-date newspaper in a more timely fashion.
Once we have optimized routes for our commercial needs, we can turn our attention to moving people. We know that the private automobile is hugely inefficient as a mover of people to their place of employment. We also know the mothers’ van is hugely inefficient to ferry children to music lessons, doctors’ appointments and hockey games. As much as we know this, we are hardly about to resolve the issue by making personal automobile ownership and use prohibitively expensive so that only the rich can afford to use them.
Who will benefit from these toll roads the Toronto Star proposes? The Star writers see them as a a disincentive to highway driving and a revenue producer for the province. Obviously these writers know nothing about Highway 407—the highway former Premier Mike Harris sold. Highway 407 works for its investors and for people in a hurry. It does nothing for anyone else.
The Highway 407 solution does not work for everybody. It does not connect well with trains or subways. It does not go downtown. It was originally designed as the Toronto bypass and fails in that as the GTA has overgrown it. It is just another road across the top of Toronto. It acts as a barrier to the city, not an access. If it was used as part of the grid, it would offer better solutions. As it stands, it is as elitist as a gated community.
The Toronto Star thinks that Metrolinx, the regional transportation authority should come up with some answers. They will not. Metrolinx is a transportation group trying to link our disparate transportation needs throughout the GTA. They do not even understand the problem.
Neither does the Toronto Star.
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