Dear government, I agree…

Dear government,

I agree with the general goals that drive your amendments, as you list them: to streamline the construction of new homes and infrastructure (e.g., water, wastewater, roads, transit), reduce gridlock, enhance community safety, and improve landlord-tenant frameworks. To keep people and goods moving by creating more capacity on roads for vehicles and drivers.

With all due respect, if these are your actual goals then I think you're going about it the wrong way.

The amendments proposed through this Act are all about "how" municipalities should go about dealing with these issues. This may achieve some of the objectives in some cases, whereas in other cases it's easy to see how prescriptionism will be ineffective or indeed counter-productive.

Look, we don't need another culture war in Ontario. We all agree on moving people and goods, and keeping communities safe. Instead of compelling municipalities to blindly prefer motorized vehicles, compel them to produce validated measurements and forecast models about how the planned road change will impact the actual priorities that you've listed.

We need to get better numbers from municipalities. We need them to state, "if we go ahead with this change, the same road in 1, 5 and 20 years will be able to throughput X number of people, compared to Y number of people today, causing fatalities to go up or down by a forecasted X% and emissions to change by this or that number".

Make approvals dependent on municipalities improving these numbers. Stop getting into the minutiae. Let them figure out how to do it. If bike paths move more people and goods, and more safely to boot, then by all means let's do it. And if they don't, well, then let's scrap those plans and go with something more efficient. Backed by real numbers, not by ideologies and blind assumptions.

Putting more motorized vehicles on our roads is not the actual goal we need to achieve, and is not always the best solution to solve our problems. I want you guys to focus on solving actual problems. Be problem-solvers. Don't be firestarters pitching one fraction against another. This is helping nobody.

Regards,
- Jakob, who wants to see all Ontarians getting where they need to go.