[sixrings]

Yes that is my position and it's an important one you need to confront because much of the public shares my sentiments. You want to fund one transportation mode at the expense of the users of another, and you're dismissive of how these millions of people will be impacted by your zero-sum approach.

Why does everyone think that the average person agrees with them. Where are the polls and why should we believe anyone when they say that the public agrees with me. Are you god. Can you read people’s minds and you conducted a survey?

FYI. I use highways daily and would gladly pay for less people to be on the road and more money going into transit.

 

[gibsonm]

Why does everyone think that the average person agrees with them. Where are the polls and why should we believe anyone when they say that the public agrees with me. Are you god. Can you read people’s minds and you conducted a survey?

FYI. I use highways daily and would gladly pay for less people to be on the road and more money going into transit.

Well you could see how your idea appeals to the public.

 

[sixrings]

Well you could see how your idea appeals to the public.

Sorry I don’t run a major news media company. Nor do I have a multi million following on Twitter. So I could ask my circle of friends sure. But that’s not exactly an accurate portrayal of the general public. How exactly do you get the pulse of the people?

 

[afransen]

Yes that is my position and it's an important one you need to confront because much of the public shares my sentiments. You want to fund one transportation mode at the expense of the users of another, and you're dismissive of how these millions of people will be impacted by your zero-sum approach.

I want highways to be usable. You're dismissive of the millions of people who lose hundreds of hours a year to traffic. Your approach is negative sum--the tragedy of the commons.

 

[tsm1072]

For a problem like this, public opinion polls are not a good idea for determining a good solution. Tolls may be unpopular, but for the greater good in the long run. Infrastructure design and funding decisions should be made by professionals that spend years studying the environmental and societal impacts of different designs and decisions. The public does not have the problem-solving toolkit that engineers and other professionals spend years learning. Public opinion is just one factor that needs to be taken into account.

 

[afransen]

For a problem like this, public opinion polls are not a good idea for determining a good solution. Tolls may be unpopular, but for the greater good in the long run. Infrastructure design and funding decisions should be made by professionals that spend years studying the environmental and societal impacts of different designs and decisions. The public does not have the problem-solving toolkit that engineers and other professionals spend years learning. Public opinion is just one factor that needs to be taken into account.

The public also doesn't have a very good crystal ball. Many people would wrongly think that tolls wouldn't change behaviour and there would be no congestion benefit of tolling. That's what Stockholm saw with their congestion charge. They did it as a time definite pilot, removed the toll (allowing the congestion return), then had a referendum.

 

[ARG1]

Why does everyone think that the average person agrees with them. Where are the polls and why should we believe anyone when they say that the public agrees with me. Are you god. Can you read people’s minds and you conducted a survey?

FYI. I use highways daily and would gladly pay for less people to be on the road and more money going into transit.

Why does everyone think that the average person agrees with them? Because most people talk to mostly their friends, family, and co-workers, so they often experience a bubble of similar ideas, and psychologically make them believe their opinions are more popular.

Polls are generally not a reliable source. I'm not going to list every issue that polls have right now, but some top issues include inadequate and unrepresentative sample sizes that lead to large margins of error, publications not knowing how to reach a specific audience or demographic (this is cited as one of the reasons why polls predicting the 2016 presidential election were way off the mark), polls that are only or mostly answered by people that have a major stake in an issue (or a vocal minority), polls that have vague or generalized questions that do a bad job at gauging the proper feelings or opinions on a topic, questions that are phrased in a way that leads the user to answer in a specific way, either maliciously or unintentionally, or sometimes polls that are edited or shifted in a way to push whatever agenda to publication is trying to push, you know, bias. At best, polls could be used as a pointer for a direction to look at, or something to consider about how a community feels about a subject, but at no point should they be used as gospel or as proof that a certain community believes in something, thinks a certain way, or has preference for one project over an other.

 

[sixrings]

Why does everyone think that the average person agrees with them? Because most people talk to mostly their friends, family, and co-workers, so they often experience a bubble of similar ideas, and psychologically make them believe their opinions are more popular.

Polls are generally not a reliable source. I'm not going to list every issue that polls have right now, but some top issues include inadequate and unrepresentative sample sizes that lead to large margins of error, publications not knowing how to reach a specific audience or demographic (this is cited as one of the reasons why polls predicting the 2016 presidential election were way off the mark), polls that are only or mostly answered by people that have a major stake in an issue (or a vocal minority), polls that have vague or generalized questions that do a bad job at gauging the proper feelings or opinions on a topic, questions that are phrased in a way that leads the user to answer in a specific way, either maliciously or unintentionally, or sometimes polls that are edited or shifted in a way to push whatever agenda to publication is trying to push, you know, bias. At best, polls could be used as a pointer for a direction to look at, or something to consider about how a community feels about a subject, but at no point should they be used as gospel or as proof that a certain community believes in something, thinks a certain way, or has preference for one project over an other.

So we can’t trust our friends and we can’t trust polls. Can we trust transportation, and city planning experts?

 

[crs1026]

^It’s amazing the hoops that politicians will jump through to appease people who cry “I shouldn’t have to pay so much....”

Electricity bills are a good example. Queens Park waved a magic wand and my sky-high electricity bill suddenly became lower. (/s)

Sorting out taxpayer angst over the economics of roads will take several iterations. The importance of any measure is how it moves that discussion towards rationality, not whether it’s a solution on its own.

First step is for Road transportation to be unbundled from general revenue funding. It shoukd be clear what the revenue sources are (doesn’t matter whether it’s tolls, gas tax, radar camera fees, licensing fees or whatever, for starters) and it should be clear where this money goes ( operations, policing, planning, investment, whatever). Government can top up as a subsidy but call it that.... so the funding and spending becomes transparent. That deals with the simplistic “I shouldn’t pay twice” argument as it will become apparent that drivers aren’t fully paying even once. Then we can debate what the pricing should be in a more rational manner.

Personally, I have no problem with subsidising transit heavily via money collected from taxpayers as the default and artificially cheapest mode of transportation available. The new reality of densification in Southern Ontario maens that we do need to disincent low value automobile use - there aren’t enough roads to go around, and building new roads is net wasteful to the economy and represents very poor land use. Road use should be prioritised with delivery of goods and services taking high priority and recreational/consumptive use being disincented. Nothing wrong with using pricing to create those signals.

Of course, if you “need” to go somewhere, there should be a much better public transportation network to get you there. But the whinging about tolls as some sort of war on drivers is just that - whinging.

- Paul

 

[ARG1]

So we can’t trust our friends and we can’t trust polls. Can we trust transportation, and city planning experts?

Depends. As a reminder, the transportation and city planning experts of the mid 2000s claimed that the DRL was unnecessary and that ATC was going to fix all of the Yonge Line's capacity woes so would you trust transportation and city planning experts?

The real answer is that the right answer only exists in 20/20 hindsight. There are a lot of places you can get pointers, but there is nowhere you can look that has all of the "answers". There is no "Scroll of Truth".

 

[sixrings]

Depends. As a reminder, the transportation and city planning experts of the mid 2000s claimed that the DRL was unnecessary and that ATC was going to fix all of the Yonge Line's capacity woes so would you trust transportation and city planning experts?

The real answer is that the right answer only exists in 20/20 hindsight. There are a lot of places you can get pointers, but there is nowhere you can look that has all of the "answers". There is no "Scroll of Truth".

If that is true then why are you such a supporter of Scarborough subway expansion. Are you sure 20/20 hindsight won’t be that it was a colossal waste of money? And even if you are sure why should we take your word for anything? If you don’t think we should trust experts then what makes you think we should trust internet posters. And what about the tolls. If we don’t put them in are you sure 20/20 will say that this was a brilliant idea?

we can’t let perfect become the enemy of the good. Even professionals don’t get everything right but it’s the best we have. And by the way professionals have said we needed a drl for decades. It’s only now that we are actually somewhat listening to them.

 

[ARG1]

If that is true then why are you such a supporter of Scarborough subway expansion. Are you sure 20/20 hindsight won’t be that it was a colossal waste of money? And even if you are sure why should we take your word for anything? If you don’t think we should trust experts then what makes you think we should trust internet posters. And what about the tolls. If we don’t put them in are you sure 20/20 will say that this was a brilliant idea?

we can’t let perfect become the enemy of the good. Even professionals don’t get everything right but it’s the best we have. And by the way professionals have said we needed a drl for decades. It’s only now that we are actually somewhat listening to them.

Tell me, when was I "such a supporter" of SSE? Please tell me. I have always stated that in terms of transit planning, SSE was not my first choice by even a longshot, I always thought that the best choice was rehabilitation to Mark 2s and then extending it so its not just a Scarborough - Kennedy Shuttle. SSE is only the 2nd best thing. What I'm against is the Scarborough LRT for a myriad of reasons that I have listed before and I won't reiterate.

Professionals and TTC higher ups have not been saying that for decades. The only reason why this thing called the Don Mills LRT was proposed in the first place unless you're suggesting that David Miller was not listening to professionals when he proposed Transit City which is big news to hear.

I don't know what we will think in 20/20 hindsight, and nor will you, unless you want to claim that you're some Internet Nostradamus. The only thing we have is a combination of evidence and logical deductions, and that's why we're here. We're passionate about transit and we want to discuss and share our opinions and why we think that X is better than Y. There is no "right answer". You're going to have experts on one side claiming one thing, and you'll have experts on the other side claiming something else. If there were a group of "experts" that had the solution to every problem, then there would be no reason for us to be here would there? We would just bow down to a group of people that make all of the calls, the end.

 

[sixrings]

Tell me, when was I "such a supporter" of SSE? Please tell me. I have always stated that in terms of transit planning, SSE was not my first choice by even a longshot, I always thought that the best choice was rehabilitation to Mark 2s and then extending it so its not just a Scarborough - Kennedy Shuttle. SSE is only the 2nd best thing. What I'm against is the Scarborough LRT for a myriad of reasons that I have listed before and I won't reiterate.

Professionals and TTC higher ups have not been saying that for decades. The only reason why this thing called the Don Mills LRT was proposed in the first place unless you're suggesting that David Miller was not listening to professionals when he proposed Transit City which is big news to hear.

I don't know what we will think in 20/20 hindsight, and nor will you, unless you want to claim that you're some Internet Nostradamus. The only thing we have is a combination of evidence and logical deductions, and that's why we're here. We're passionate about transit and we want to discuss and share our opinions and why we think that X is better than Y. There is no "right answer". You're going to have experts on one side claiming one thing, and you'll have experts on the other side claiming something else. If there were a group of "experts" that had the solution to every problem, then there would be no reason for us to be here would there? We would just bow down to a group of people that make all of the calls, the end.

You don’t believe there are no experts. You believe you are the expert.

 

[ARG1]

You don’t believe there are no experts. You believe you are the expert.

Tell me, when have I even remotely implied I'm the expert?

 

[sixrings]

Tell me, when have I even remotely implied I'm the expert?

It’s all my imagination. Maybe it’s your condescending tone in your comments. But maybe it’s just my imagination. Either way I hope for tolls.