Comstock: Small merchants sandbagged by TTC and city hall

For Earth Day I looked at our big-city problems through a green lens. I do believe that green considerations make it easier to be in the middle of the road. It seems more dignified to be in the middle. The left and right, the doves and hawks, the pro and con groups keep feeding the media with poorly thought-out positions.

The more radical positions usually get exposed as maybe not the best version of an idea. John Tory’s idea of fracturing the public school system with tax funding for private schools seems to have removed him from the middle.

I thought the Green Party was the middle but someone convinced them to include in their platform support for Vancouver’s unsafe injection sites. These aren’t methadone clinics, treatment or counselling, but a place that enables the local connection for the Columbian cocaine cartel and Taliban heroin middleman. How Green an idea is that? The Green Party might have thought about buying up those poppy crops for worldwide medical use instead of that poppycock.

The city has currently begun a Punch and Judy show of traveling deputers asking for public confirmation to tear down the Gardiner Expressway. The Waterfront’s tsar and tsarinas have decided to tear down the Gardiner Expressway. Their question now is how to do it aesthetically.

Unfortunately they are not looking into rebuilding this 1950s infrastructure. No doubt we could do it much better some 60 years later; in a more useful and aesthetic manner: bikes underneath, buildings underneath, some overpasses are quite graceful. But this is now about just tearing it down. This passageway through the city is an artery which when cut off will arrest the cardiac beat of the Downtown. Please consider this a radical idea.

The idea of rebuilding and repositioning the Gardiner Expressway has been made by several. I remember a design four years ago in which the highway was placed above the railway. That looked very organized and far too expensive for Toronto; we can’t even build a subway.

A diverse transportation system allows for multiple types of transportation. The railway berm is the real separation of the Downtown east side and the waterfront. Why block creative thinking with an overly Downtown, politically minded, anti-car position? But how green could it possibly be, to eliminate the least polluting way for vehicles to run, and then replace that efficient artery with a high pollution, stop and go surface road?

This is the same logic being exhibited by the TTC. They would like the streetcars to run down our main streets, unencumbered by cars. This saves them seconds per kilometre. You see, moving efficiently is good. It is good for the streetcars and equally good for the cars. We need some cars; what if they are electric? Diversity is our strength. I would like the fire trucks and ambulances to be able to use the Gardiner Expressway if they needed quick transport. I would like to go to Ikea in my Zip Car.

Well, while the anti-car people try to shrink our city to greatness, the TTC is so full of itself it has come full circle in historical terms at least. When you talk to someone from St. Clair Avenue, Giambrone’s own riding, Dundas St. W., King St. E. and W. and sections of Queen St, from the business owners you hear the old term railroaded.

The term “railroaded” is synonymous with having something unwanted shoved down your throat or forced against your will. It is akin to “You can’t fight City Hall”. With bullyboy energy City Hall is making transit corridors of these streets. And, it is often to the extreme detriment of the neighbourhood merchants. These transit corridors will basically eliminate parking or 75%-80% of the parking, which is already limited during rush hours.

TTC is asking for longer parking restriction making even receiving deliveries problematic. What this railroading change brings to the neighbourhood merchant is a completely different streetscape.

The morning hours are important for not only deliveries but also for bakeries, coffee shops and fast food outlets. The afternoons are important selling hours for retail. The businesses they have been running will change.

The property value and financing of these properties comes into question. Investment is certainly held back in order to see what the change will be. It would appear that Transit City planning has no concern for neighbourhood retail. The TTC railroading is done expertly with an anthropologist-like feeding of mythical diversionary stories. We now celebrate maintenance.

These changes to the neighbourhoods will have dire consequences for street-front retailers. These small businesses are an integral part of the fabric of the City of Toronto, once called a city of neighbourhoods. Transit City will in effect be supporting chain stores, big-box and mall shopping centres with acres of free parking, over the local neighbourhood retailers. How green is that?