As a community advocate and…

As a community advocate and urban planning Master’s candidate, I highly urge the provincial government to withdraw the proposed amendments to §195.2 of the Highway Traffic Act and Schedules 2 and 3 of Bill 212 enacting the Build More Highways Faster Act and the Highway 413 Act. These regulations are environmentally, agriculturally and socially deleterious to our Greater Toronto Hamilton Area communities and substantially harm agricultural lands in Caledon, the Holland Marsh and in other areas of Peel Region and Simcoe and Wellington Counties as well as the welfare of farmers, an increasing contingent of which are racialized and harvest crops for their respective cultural communities.

Additionally, the spending of monies involved in these three actions contained in Bill 212 represent investments that will in fact constitute bad planning and negatively impact economic activity inside Toronto; in its surrounding cities as well as engender more air pollution and increase child and senior deaths from more people being displaced back into cars and away from bicycles. Transit users on buses whether TTC, MiWay, BT, DRT, YRT or GO will be negatively impacted by these possible traffic flows. The currently existing bicycle lanes on Yonge and Bloor Streets and University Avenue represent policies rooted in municipal autonomy and principles of democracy and participatory planning. This was also Toronto’s solution to a struggle that cities all around the region have contemplated in creating places and communities where they could fit more business activity and people together into smaller places. All without requiring environmentally unsustainable automotive use or single-detached home construction that would eventually exhaust various non-renewable resources and detriment the entire world.

While the province is free to exercise its power over municipalities, they being its “creatures”, doing so will cost at least $48 million from City of Toronto estimates. These funds could be invested in other initiatives to aid traffic flows, including cars, or that could more greatly benefit Ontarians.

The $48 million could be used to: create a fund to purchase affordable housing units and complexes at risk of private market acquisition; improve health care for Ontarians; fund labor and material costs needed to increase GO service system-wide, including two-way all-day service on the Kitchener, Milton, Stouffville and Richmond Hill lines; build housing units through a public builder to help offset vacancy rates and land value increases tied to housing speculation in Ontario; increase the level of payments remitted through programs like Ontario Works or the Ontario Disability Support Program; the list could go on.

Most critically, the province could mandate that municipalities substantially increase user fees for parking to reflect the true cost and negative sociopolitical and economic externalities associated with widespread automotive use in the GTA. This one action is empirically proven to heavily deter people from driving and to instead carpool, walk, take public transit and cycle. This one action would keep our elders and our children safe on sidewalks or on roads, greatly increase farebox revenues for our transit and of course reduce traffic without hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars on destroying existing public works.