Ask, and you shall receive!
If every vote for Miller became, in effect, a vote of confidence for Transycophant City, I did my share: I voted for Pitfield...
It's true that some politicians have almost nothing but highs and lows during their term while others spin their wheels and get little done (or, get just little things done), suffering no huge setbacks or disasters. Miller's one of the latter (as is McGuinty), which perhaps isn't surprising considering some people voted for him because he would *not* build something big (the Island bridge). A full term or two of the status quo is perfectly fine as long as the next mayor manages to accomplish something and isn't forced to spend years fixing mistakes...in that case, the Miller years may be seen as having laid a solid foundation for future improvements (no steps backward), but what if the next mayor['s term] is a huge failure? If that happens, the Miller years, too, will be seen as a total failure...by me, anyway. It's interesting to note that 3 of the 4 pros listed by lordmandeep are just things that happened during Miller's reign for which he will sort of take credit.
Miller may not have gotten many big things done, but he also does lots of little things wrong, like threatening to close libraries and shut down the Sheppard subway (even though the TTC's surface routes are the real black holes of funding...the Sheppard threat was just another dig at Lastman) instead of doing something outrageous like increasing revenues by tens of millions of dollars every year just by raising property taxes by two or three dollars
per month. He's also letting unions run the city and seems to do nothing to stop them from gobbling up an ever large slice of the pie. So, if he's not getting big things done, is he really that successful at micromanaging behind the scenes, either?
It's certainly true that vision is the problem, not costs, when it comes to transit. Scarberians were briefly annoyed when the promised Danforth subway extension to STC was pooh-poohed but no one seems to have noticed that the alternatives to this cheap subway extension are costing three times as much. "Sorry, Scarborough, we can't afford $1.2B for this subway project, so here's $3B or $4B in other LRT projects to make it up to you." Umm, why not extend the subway and then also spend the remaining
two-plus billion dollars on other transit lines? Oh, yeah, because Miller is fighting an ideological battle against subways. Toronto has a successful - albeit inadequately small - subway network, we had plans for further expansions well into Miller's term, every other city in the world our size is building them, and the provincial government has proposed spending enough on transit to more than cover all the subway construction Toronto would *ever* need.
Even if Toronto was blanketed in LRT lines - well, more accurately, if 6 of the dozens of major corridors in the city were converted from buses to streetcars - it's amusing to compare the transit benefits of this $9+ billion plan to the transit benefits from something [cheaper] like improving GO lines or the DRL. Miller may be keen on redeveloping the suburbs into urbanlicious Avenues but there's no need to burn through a rare transit funding windfall by wasting billions on pet projects to priority neighbourhoods when he could accomplish the same thing,
for free, by simple rezoning, letting the transit funding actually be used for something crazy like efficiently moving people around the city.
