Quote:
Originally Posted by J.OT13
Well actually, he was a big part of why Ottawa's streetcar network was ripped out; he hired the guy (Jacques Gréber) who created the capital's "car centric/remove any signs of streetcars or railways from downtown and make it a sterile uninhabited monument to blandness and banality" master plan in the 50s.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Mackenzie-King. Great leadership during the war, policies seemed decent from what I've seen, created Gatineau Park, which is awesome, but he was responsible for the steep decline of Ottawa's downtown in the mid-century.
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To be fair, privately-owned streetcar systems (basically all but Toronto) hadn't made any real investments in their infrastructure since the 1910s:
- The 20s saw the emphasis shift from investment to value for stockholders, so profits weren't being reinvested.
- The 30s just weren't a good decade for transit ridership or profits
- The war monopolized resources for the 40s
So by the 50s, you had unprofitable companies running infrastructure which was almost a half-century old which would require significant investments to bring up to scratch. Twenty years earlier or later, governments might have payed up, but this was a time when there was a firm belief that cars and subways were the future and that streetcars were relics of a bygone era. Without investment in renewal, the new publicly-owned transit corporations determined that it wasn't worth the expense and that buses could do the job for much less.
We didn't save the streetcars, but I think that it was wild speculation and corporate shortsightedness that lead the streetcar to its untimely (but temporary, from the looks of it) death.
But I totally agree with you that a lot of Greber's plan was inestimably damaging to Ottawa.