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Look, life is short. They used to build expressways quickly and efficiently, without worrying about pesty community groups and impact studies and whatnot. Now, you can't do so. And Toronto's a mess because they stopped the Spadina:p
 
Well, Mystery White Boy's parents probably hadn't lost their virginity yet when the Spadina was stopped, so maybe his naivety's excusable...
 
adma said:
Look, life is short. They used to build expressways quickly and efficiently, without worrying about pesty community groups and impact studies and whatnot. Now, you can't do so. And Toronto's a mess because they stopped the Spadina
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Sir Novelty Fashion said:
^ If only I hadn't already heard that explained to me by more than one person, except with a straight face.
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Well, don'tcha know the reason Toronto is having budget problems today is because they killed the expressways plan. Everyone know 905 is better off financially and they're the ones who loooove expressways! I know this to be true because Wikipedia told me so. Including the Jane Jacobs article no less!

Now, perhaps you might think things are a bit "biased" because those Wikipedia articles were edited by the same guy who had a website all about the municipal expressways plan and also wrote the CAA's "Missing Links" plan calling for an expressway in Lake Ontario and also called for a bigger elevated expressway to replace the Gardiner. But that would only be because you're a kooky car-hater.

:p
 
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courtesy pancsi on SSC. - Sept 23/07
 
lordmandeep said:
they do work safely....


Really you are a child....

safety is paramount over anything, a delayed building is nothing compared to a dead or injured worker.... :rolleyes:
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This may sound harsh, but there's a website that says when a society makes human life too precious, regulations drive up costs and slows everything down until eventually many enterprises become economically unviable, slowing down technological progress.

Humanity's outward push into space has long been dreamed of and predicted. In our own time, it seems as though the dream is being achieved. However, making space economically viable seems still to be a long way away - and until space is financially self-sustaining human exploitation of its potential is not going to take off. There is to be sure an impressive number of space entrepreneurial companies springing up with plans for everything from space tourism to asteroid mining. However, these companies will increasingly find that they face the same problems as the advocates of nuclear power and genetic modification of crops. Their imagination is constrained by the political, economic and social conditions of the descent.

Consider, for example, plans for space tourism. Getting into space is not only expensive but also dangerous. Rocket engineers would currently regard a launch failure rate of 1% as very good - lately they have not even been achieving that. Yet such a failure rate would doom the space tourism business. After Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who was to have been the first ordinary person to go into space, was killed along with six other astronauts in the Challenger disaster, the US space shuttle fleet was grounded for some five years. Furthermore, catastrophic failure like this is not the only risk. Astronauts receive high radiation doses - far higher say than the residents of Seascale. If space tourism companies ever get off the ground at all, they will soon be facing bankruptcy once the newspapers have branded their product the carcinogenic trip of a lifetime or after an accident forces them to ground their fleet for lengthy investigations before it has even begun to pay for itself.

The problem is that space travel will not become orders of magnitude safer until it is a commonplace rather than a heroic undertaking. But to get to that point, we will need to launch very many flights, some of which will inevitably end in disaster. In today's compensation-claiming culture, where human life is regarded as priceless, that kind of sacrifice is surely intolerable. We cannot make space flight a common experience until it is almost perfectly safe. But we cannot make it perfectly safe until it is a common experience. Today, therefore, we find ourselves stymied. But this is the kind of impasse or Catch-22 that a dark age allows us to solve. In the time of the economic recovery, we can expect that people will start going into space again. They will do so on a larger scale and they will not suspend their activity every time that people die. By the time the new era is sophisticated enough to demand high safety standards, enough will have been learned to ensure that those standards are achieved.
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http://website.lineone.net/~marc.widdowson/Part4/Chapter39.html
 
Transportfan said:
This may sound harsh, but there's a website that says when a society makes human life too precious, regulations drive up costs and slows everything down until eventually many enterprises become economically unviable, slowing down technological progress.



http://website.lineone.net/~marc.widdowson/Part4/Chapter39.html
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Harsh? Yes. A rigid economics argument? Yes. An acceptable argument? No, not by any stretch of any imagination. If our society puts too much value on a human life then I wonder what the author of this article would feel if his or her family all died on a construction site or due to cancer caused by inadequate compliance and regulatory standards for some product they thought was safe or the countless other satefy, environmental and health reasons our society values. Money and productivity are great so long as the costs to other people's lives, health and environments doesn't affect me, is that the argument?

There are other labour and union regulations that slow things down that have nothing to do with safety and health and the environment. But we shouldn't repeat countless past mistakes and disregard these regulations just so we can have a pretty new skyscraper or a faster built rail service or whatever. It would say a lot about a society who had a government who didn't actively (albiet painfully slowly) work to ensure compliance and regulatory safety for such things as our misely, unimportant lives or environment.

And hey, wasn't this topic about a specific building... hard to remember which one... maybe someone can help me bring it back on topic.
 
Sir Novelty Fashion said:
Wait, there's a website that says that? Then it must be true!
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You didn't read the excerpt I posted? Space travel is still a major undertaking and hardly routine as far as general use is concerned. Compare it's slow advacement to that of the development of aviation nearly a hundred years ago.
 
An important difference between air travel and space travel is that there are piles of money to be made in the former. I suspect that has been a factor in the speed of development.

But, that has nothing to do with the RBC tower.
 
Transportfan said:
You didn't read the excerpt I posted? Space travel is still a major undertaking and hardly routine as far as general use is concerned. Compare it's slow advacement to that of the development of aviation nearly a hundred years ago.
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The history of aviation is more than one hundred years - if you are willing to include all human efforts to achieve flight.
 
guys.. RBC Centre is a major commercial development.

We haven't seen anything like this in Toronto for 20 years.. and you guys are talking about going to the moon?
 
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