|
June 2004
Newsletter
It Breaks All the Rules
Why do we need an expressway in the Red Hill Valley?
We are free to speculate because, as Councillor Dave Braden says, no independent analysis of the road has ever been done during the last 25 years.
According to Braden, the expressway is Hamilton's Special Project par excellence: it breaks all the rules.
Would councillors stand for $56.5 million in contracts being "walked on" the floor of council without a staff report?
For The Road , yes. That's what happened May 12 near the end of a Council meeting.
Moved by Maria Pearson, seconded by Dave Mitchell, to their everlasting shame. Passed by the DiIanni Majority with McHattie, Powers, McCarthy, Horwath ('bye Andrea, we'll miss ye) and Braden the honourable dissenters.
Council's decision, said Braden, was "absolutely blind based on propaganda."
So, now the major infrastructure building for The Road can proceed. No matter that approvals are outstanding from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Ontario Ministries and Natural Resources, and the Hamilton Conservation Authority.
For The Road, anything goes.
Or, is it for Aldo DeSantis that anything goes? A Spec article that appeared April 21 makes you wonder.
DeSantis and his company Multi-Area Developments, according to the Spec, are about to begin work on a "giant, sprawling" $1-billion housing and commercial project on the southeast Mountain.
Now known as "Summit Park (it's the highest point in Hamilton)," it is also referred to as Meadowlands East, after its namesake in Ancaster.
"It's a project that suffered years of delays, an OMB hearing and an uncertain future because of postponements and challenges to the Red Hill Creek Expressway," commented writer Mark McNeil in the interview.
But DeSantis provided the clincher:
"Once the Red Hill (Expressway) is finished," he said, ".I would say this whole area will take (on) a life of its own because .almost everywhere else in Hamilton is pretty well out of land. If not for this project would have only two or three years of land left (for residential development)," said DeSantis.
Presumably the 160-hectares owned by DeSantis, which was purchased in 1998, does not now have a "life of its own" and won't have until 10,000 people are living on it in houses that will sell for between $215,000 and $350,000.
Life is suburban sprawl.
But of course Hamilton is not (yet) all suburbs. It does have older, urban areas. Most of us dearly hope, for example, that our beleaguered downtown will someday have a "life of its own."
In early April, it was the turn of our inner-city champions of the expressway to restate their reasons for it. The occasion was a report to a committee of council to toll the expressway.
Horrors!
"I'll tell you, Mr. Chairman, if we even remotely go down this road (tolls), I'll be the first to bring forward a motion reconsider the entire project," thundered Ward 4's Sam Merulla in his best populist form.
Merulla, once an opponent of the expressway, supports it because it will remove vehicular traffic - especially trucks -- from the streets in his ward. Ward 5's Chad Collins takes the same stand.
Merulla and Collins are true believers. They believe that expressways take cars and trucks off local roads.
So do our local traffic engineers.
Hard evidence is accumulating, however, that traffic engineer profession "pulls its conclusions about the meaning of evidence out of thin air - sheer guesswork - even when it deigns to notice evidence," writes famed urbanist Jane Jacobs in her new book Dark Age Ahead .
If you want to get rid of traffic, the newest independent evidence suggests, you should close roads, not build new ones - and if you don't close roads, you should reduce the number of lanes on them and preferably make roads two-way instead of one-way.
Hamilton has too many roads and too many road lanes - "overcapacity" in the words of the traffic engineers.
Merulla and Collins cherish their delusions about traffic in the same way as they blind themselves to the financial costs of building the expressway and then maintaining it in perpetuity.
But some City staff take a more hard-headed view of things and that is why they are proposing tolls for the road, even if this contradicts past political promises to the contrary.
Merulla and Collins won the day this time - but will they down the road (pardon!) when the costs of snow removal, repaving, and possibly lawsuits from nearby residents (for health-related reasons) cannot be ignored? |
