The car’s a necessity for many commuters
The Liberals, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, won the most recent federal election. This was music to the ears of people who don’t like cars.
The election allowed some newspaper columnists to make the leap from Trudeau’s election to road tolls on Toronto-area highways. Don’t ask how; they just did.
One in particular (he writes for this paper, in fact) used the occasion to attack the current mayor of Toronto, who’s not a Liberal, for defending the car. As I have read this column of his about a thousand times before, I skimmed to the bottom to see how he would wrap it up this time and the following paragraph stopped me cold:
“The Toronto the car built is giving way to another city, one that’s dense, highrise and compact. It is a city where bicycles make as much sense as cars, and in which pedestrians are demanding freedom of the streets.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d just read, but it proved what I’ve long suspected: for this guy, the “city” only exists from Bloor south to the waterfront, and from the Don River west to Bathurst St.
I have news for him: There is life beyond the confines of that tiny piece of the world he described above. It is where tens of thousands of people who work in Toronto live, and who need their cars to get them into the city and out.
There are not enough GO trains or buses for all of them to use. Period. For those thousands of people, the car is a necessity and every time somebody suggests that they pay, in the form of tolls, even more of their hard-earned money to get to and from their workplaces each day is nothing less than insulting.
It also shows a gross misunder- standing of current realities.
Turn on CP24 or City at 6 a.m. any day of the work week and the reporters will tell you whether traffic is moving over the Burlington Skyway. That’s at 6 a.m., which means people are leaving their houses in St. Catharines and Niagara Falls at 4:30 or 5 a.m. to make it into work in Toronto on time. No subway for them. Want a shock? Go out to Woodstock — maybe even as far west as London — at 6 p.m. and start driving east on the 401and I guarantee that you’ll be astounded at the wall — the wall — of traffic heading west, most of it originating in Toronto. No GO for them. There are family people in those cars who work in Toronto and who can’t afford to live there any more because it costs a million bucks to buy a house. They want to live in their own home on their own piece of property where their kids can play hockey or basketball in the driveway and not be jam-packed into some highrise condo that some downtown urban sophisticate thinks is Shangri-la.
Those car drivers, who have no alternative, must drive in and out of Toronto every day to make a living. And every time somebody brings up the topic of a toll to drive on the Gardiner, or the QEW, or the DVP — whether it’s somebody in government or some newspaper columnist who thinks the world starts at the lake and ends at Bloor St. — it suggests that making it even harder for those people to keep their heads above water is no big deal.
They pay through the nose for the necessity of owning a car already. They should just be left alone and the politicians who made this mess in the first place be made to fix it another way. nmcdonald@thestar.ca