Harris' way IS the highway

In Tory Ontario, public transit means more roads for the people - and more sprawl

Commentary from Larry Solway

  When I heard Premier Mike Harris, the guy in charge of Ontario, suddenly start talking about Smart Growth I was stunned. Stunned! I thought - the master of unfettered marketplace domination has had an epiphany. Somewhere on his own road to Damascus (with a vigilant eye on the polls which tell him his Tories are tanking, and even the NDP is returning to at least its core support) the man has come to his senses. Maybe he read what I wrote last week in Straight Goods about the city being the critical mass that makes the economy work, and he is going to cave in on the issue of suburban sprawl.
  I was wrong. Smart Growth, Ontario-style is not a recognition of The City and a rejection of sprawl. There was no epiphany. (But I was right about his poll-watching.) Smart Growth is to control sprawl by creating more transit. Well, sort of. The transit Mike Harris has in mind is the four lane cement and asphalt kind of transit. He and his Superbuild (the alleged partnership of your tax money and mine with the treasuries of companies bent on expansion) have highways on the brain. His idea of transit is to make it easier for monster trucks and sports utes to get to Buffalo more quickly, so there's to be another toll road from Hamilton to Fort Erie. His idea of transit is to make it easier to get to ski and resort country around Collingwood by building yet another four lane toll road. And there will be another one north of the new 407, and he will continue his push northward to his own golf course constituency by "opening up" everything from Muskoka to North Bay with the expanding highway 11.
  In the 50s, politicians and people believed that the future was the satellite city, (a nice word for suburban sprawl) so they built and built. Car companies and tire nabobs conspired to buy and dismantle existing rail service to pave the way for today's snarl of super freeways that have turned the L.A. Basin into a paved Hell.
 

Look along toll highway 407 and you will see the ear-to-ear smile of developers

  Are Harris and his party so truly in the hands of the developers, car companies and suburban wannabe politicians? Does he not have even the foggiest notion of what almost every decent futurist and planner is saying: that more highways mean more development and more sprawl?
  Look along toll highway 407 and you will see the ear-to-ear smile of developers who are doing their best to plug that new highway with commuters who have moved to new subdivisions made possible and accessible by the new highway that was supposed to relieve congestion. The truth is that developers always build at the end of any new highway.
  Money must be spent to keep the cities vibrant, growing, and alive. The money spent on highways (highly capital intensive) should be spent on transit systems (much more labour intensive and much more beneficial to all.) The federal government is paying token attention by announcing new rail transit from the existing sprawl to downtown Toronto. Are they listening to the president of Canadian National who wants tax credits for shippers who will put tractor trailers on rail flatcars and develop intermodal transport?
  You make a city work by growing its critical mass. New subway means new building. New building means more people which equals more transit which means fewer cars. Even the misbegotten runaways who flee to the ex-urban heaven of malls and cul-de-sacs can't object to a system that reduces the traffic as they rush to work in the City they couldn't wait to leave.
  Did anyone here in the smug East notice the editorial comment springing from the transit strike in Vancouver? The Vancouver Sun wants the newly minded tax-cutting neo-liberal Gordon Campbell to step in. "A huge range of people are fed up - from those trying to manage businesses without enough customers and employees, to students, to working people, to seniors who can't afford to get around without buses." Good stuff, except that the reality is most Vancouverites, smug in the mountain-view paradise, are quite happy to drive their cars to work. As for the transit riders - let 'em eat cake!
  Is Vancouver the future? Is Toronto spreading until it goes uninterrupted to Lake Simcoe? Can cities survive in the face of this new-speak Smart/Dumb growth? Beats me.

What do you think of urban swrawl? See what others have written and state your views.

Then take the Straight Goods Poll: What can stop urban sprawl?

Posted: June 18, 2001

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