I'd say that some are biased towards prioritizing Toronto on this issue, I'd say others aren't. Fair enough?
You're assuming "prioritizing Toronto" necessarily means accepting large amounts of waste to get some indirect benefits. Many people clearly don't accept that view at all. Some people think that the benefits aren't worth the waste. It's a jump of logic to extend from that that they don't prioritize Toronto.
Actually, anybody who remains open-minded on this issue and who genuinely has an interest in 'a better urban Toronto' will acknowledge that there is a lack of 'academic' consensus regarding the net returns of an olympics, that it varies greatly from host city to host city, that there are numerous intangibles and peripherals to factor in, and that different host cities set out with differing priorities, i.e. those of Beijing were about presenting propaganda to the world while those of Barcelona were about urban revitalization, and so on. It's never 100% about the games. You simply can't judge the 'impact' of a games without looking at all of a host city's objectives.
No. Academic consensus has long been that mega sporting events are highly unlikely to yield net benefits to hosts. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about World Cup, Olympics, Superbowl or just general sports team franchises (who here actually thinks the Skydome has been a net boon to the City?).
Here is a quote from the National Bureau of Economic Research:
"More rigorous studies are skeptical of the net economic benefits of hosting mega-events; see e.g., Baade and Matheson (2002) and Owen (2005). The costs of holding such events seem con- siderable. Further, any enduring benefits derive mostly from infrastructure investments that the host city could choose to make independently of the games. Much of the spending on the event by local citizens is a substitute from a different leisure activity or consumption good, rather than true additional spending [e.g., Siegfried and Zimbalist (2000) and Coates and Humphreys (2003)]. Moreover, the projects associated with the games typically seem to be white elephants, such as poorly-used sporting facilities associated with idiosyncratic Olympic sports, or hotels and trans- portation infrastructure built to accommodate a one-time peak demand of just three weeks.
Some have argued that hosting sporting events yields a non-pecuniary “feel good” benefit to local citizens who are filled with civic pride following a mega-event, even if they do not attend [e.g. Rappaport and Wilkerson (2001), Carlino and Coulson (2004), or Maennig and du Plessis (2007)]. However, the very existence of this intangible spillover is uncertain, let alone its magnitude. It seems safe to say that a majority of the profession considers it unlikely that these benefits justify the large public expenditures involved in hosting such events [e.g. Coates, Humphreys, and Zimbalist (2006) and Coates (2007)]. "
This question has actually been studied lots and the results are consistently negative. While that particular paper did find some positive trade outcomes, it found that they were a product of host-city signalling and even extended to failed bid cities. In the spirit of evidenced based planning, I will defer to the actual academics over you.
This really is a trite point, and it is further undermined by the fact that many of the so-called 'nice' cities you cite have already hosted the games, have bid for them or are bidding for them. It isn't suspicious that cities vie for something that is desirable to have! Let's keep the discussion here to facts and not to paranoid conspiracy theories.
First, I picked a random sampling of universally recognized global cities. It's a bizare to use scare quotes and a needless "so-called." Second, I clearly limited my selected cities that hadn't hosted "within our lifetimes," which is true unless you were around for Berlin 1936, in which case please enlighten me how the positive effects of the games survived WW2. Third, so what if the cities I listed had bid for the games? That similarity between failed bid cities and host cities shows Olympic supporters confuse cause and effect. Rich, successful cities vie to host the Olympics because only they can afford to, as opposed to the Olympics making cities rich and successful.
Are you really trying to demonstrate that the games offer no infrastructure boost by comparing a random non-host city to a random host city? Do you understand why this doesn't work? You need to compare a a host city before its games to the same host city after the games... Let me correct this for you though, "Hosting the Olympic games results in a ***substantial, committed and time-lined** boost in infrastructure funding that would not have occurred otherwise.
You didn't provide any actual evidence to support your assumption.
Longitudinally, there's no Olympic boom evidence. This can be seen in both host and non host cities. Host cities repackage projects to serve the Olympics. In Van, the Canada Line began planning in the early 90s and the Federal funding commitment came two years before the city was awarded the 2010 games. This makes sense; why would politically unfeasible transit projects suddenly become feasible when wrapped in the Olympics? Likewise, in a failed host city like Toronto, the bid was followed by a decade of unprecedented transit investment
Latitudinally, if there was an observable and durable "Olympic infrastructure boom," we would expect host cities to have observably better infrastructure than non-host cities. In that context, we can easily compare host cities to similar cities in the same country and clearly see that no boom exists. Montreal, Vancouver nor Calgary saw a boom vs. Toronto in any of those time periods, Sydney didn't compared to Melbourne, Beijing didn't relative to Shanghai, Barcelona clearly didn't relative to Madrid and so on. The entire "Olympic infrastructure boom" argument is that the Olympics somehow induces senior levels of government to spend more on host cities than they would otherwise, but in fact host and non-host cities in the same country never have observably different outcomes in terms of infrastructure.
Simply showing that some infrastructure projects coincide with the Olympics is nowhere near sufficient to show that the Olympics induce funding that wouldn't have materialized. It's identical to Homer Simpson's Bear Patrol logic.
I'll take committed and earmarked dollars with a firm timeline over politically-motivated promises any day. How many 'transit visions and studies' have been promised and squandered in Toronto now? I've lost count. ...
Well I'll be the last to ever defend transit planning in this City, but despite lots of false starts we have spent around 12-13 billion dollars on transit infrastructure in Toronto in the past decade. Moreover, the vast majority of that had nothing to do with either PanAm or 2008, save for maybe UPx (which, tellingly, was probably the least salient to our actual transit problems). The big spends in Toronto came with the ECLRT, TYSSE and rehabilitation of the streetcar and subway network, none of which have any causal link to any sort of sports event.
I'd look foolish to stand here and predict with certainty that EVERY SINGLE PENNY the OLP has promised will be spent, but I think we're being overly jaded in pretending that senior levels of government are so stingy with Toronto. The record clearly shows that the best way to make it a political issue. That's how stuff gets funded, not by tying it to some silly sports event.
I'll give you this one (with some exceptions). It may cause some wasteful spending to host an olympics, nay it will cause some wasteful spending. There is no benefit without a cost. As I mentioned in my earlier post we have to weight some of these negative or wasteful costs to the positive benefits. This is what all cities do. ... It may be priced too high and not used efficiently yet, but it is in place now and not the dream it would have continued to be without the panams.
That's not good logic. You're just assuming that because something should be done, it will be done. That's just clearly not how government works, as we all acknowledge.
Moreover, even the Olympic's biggest proponents would argue that the games guarantee "moving people efficiently and effectively throughout the City and the region." In literally no host city has the Olympics ever caused a regionally significant improvement in transit. Ever. Period. More common are temporary transit measures like the Olympic Lanes in Sydney and London or even our PanAm lanes.
It's not even like the Olympics are such huge transit problems. For our 2008 bid, 85% of athletes (and an even higher percent of spectators) were expected to compete in the Waterfront venues near the Athlete Village. The induced transit impact in usually isn't very significant compared to the millions of daily rush hour commuters most cities deal with. There are some local transit issues around specific venues, but the overall regional travel demand impacts aren't typically huge.
