Raise the Hammer

The St Clair project was badly executed, but a huge success, after the worse than necessary growing pains were out of the way. Mind you they completely rebuilt the street. Moving hydrants, burying hydro, etc.

Here are what people are saying:

http://torontoist.com/2012/03/behold-the...

link to infographic from here

This infographic based on City stats reveals a dramatically different picture than the one Ford paints: traffic congestion and collision rates are down, while traffic speed and ridership are up. Another nugget Lorinc dug up: for the period from 2006 to 2011, the total value of all building permits issued by the City on St. Clair from Yonge to Keele was $162.5 million. And as he pointed out to us, the peak was in 2008—right in the midst of construction on the street. This is an area people are quite literally buying into.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/david-r-mil...

While having a coffee with a friend at one of the terrific new cafes on St. Clair Avenue West, I decided to do an informal and unscientific survey of people's opinions about the St. Clair Avenue right-of-way. "It's great!" was the common refrain. When I probed a little deeper, people spoke about the wonderful rejuvenation that has occurred on St. Clair. Excellent new restaurants, cafes, shops and an incredible sense of street life and community have emerged in a neighbourhood that 10 years ago had a large number of small businesses that were struggling to survive. For them, the investment that the City of Toronto and the Toronto Transit Commission made to create the St. Clair right-of-way has been a roaring success.

The articles I found that were critical of St Clair had issues with the duration and extent of disruption due to poor handling of the project. For example this or this With those renovation pains out of the way, I have not found anything to support the notion that the area is worse off now, very much the opposite.

Now, when highway bridges get replaced in a single weekend, glorious masterpieces of choreography, we hear about it in the news and ooh and aah. An LRT build is far from minor, but with ambition and skill that Hamilton still has, betcha you could build it in the time it takes to erect a Walmart.

Comment edited by mikeonthemountain on 2014-06-18 19:41:06