Quote:
Originally Posted by dennis1
Why will transit fail? Because people expect to be subsidized for living on the
periphery? The outer region of the City is not dense eoungh for subways. A buried Eglinton east line to Kennedy will lose money and then everyone is complaing that TTC is losing (even more) money. People cannot have it both ways.
- Fair Wharn?
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Not quite. You want to talk about choice, so let's talk about choice. If you do nothing to bring rapid transit to the suburbs, property values along the current "core" lines will rise disproportionately relative to everything else and people who cannot afford to live there will eventually be
forced to live in the periphery. Which effectively rewards the richest members of society and punishes the poorer ones, which is what I thought you left-wingers were trying to avoid in the first place. If you're looking to create ghettos like Winnipeg's North, then ignoring transit is a great place to start.
It's like saying "Fuck Sudbury, I don't want Toronto subisidizing the Highway 400 extension". Or "Fuck Montreal, why should I have to pay to repair the Champlain Bridge?" Attitudes like that are selfish and economically damaging in the aggregate. By ignoring the outlying areas you are imposing a huge implicit cost on the city by limiting most activity and development to a few key corridors and ignoring the high marginal returns to transit in areas with comparatively less development. I suspect part of the reason why the downtowners oppose an Eglinton subway is because they don't want to realize a relative decrease in property values.