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Paving
Hamilton paradise: Red Hill Expressway a '50s-style
design dinosaur that will cost taxpayers and hurt the environment
Aug. 9, 2003.
Letter to the Editor, Toronto Star
First
proposed in 1956, the Red Hill Creek Expressway is Hamilton's
Spadina Expressway.
The
Spadina Expressway was also designed in the late 1950s:
a simple time when progress meant more roads and polluting
smokestack industries; a naïve time before Rachel Carson
and Jane Jacobs wrote their seminal books on urban development
that changed many of us forever.
Fast
forward to 2003, where just two weeks back at the Kyoto
and sprawl conference at York University, I listened to
the inspiring story of how Torontonians stopped Spadina.
Bravo to Toronto.
But,
elsewhere, some things don't change much in 46 years.
While
promoting anti-sprawl policies elsewhere across the province,
provincial Liberal Leader Dalton McGuinty is a big supporter
of Hamilton's Red Hill Expressway, pledging, if elected,
to participate in paving over 41,000 trees and 54 hectares
of natural lands.
On
your behalf, the provincial Liberals are committed to paying
half of the $230 million cost for the 7.5-kilometre roadway
— the most expensive road, per kilometre, in Canadian
history.
McGuinty
appears unconcerned that the road is 95 per cent within
Hamilton's largest park and natural area (twice as large
as High Park), or that plans include relocating 7.6 kilometres
of the creek and a new cut in the internationally significant
Niagara Escarpment.
He
is not worried that the road will open up hundreds of hectares
of new land for more sprawl or about the serious health
effects for Hamilton's already stressed east-end residents,
through air pollution from an estimated 1 million-plus diesel
trucks per year that will use the valley as a shortcut to
the U.S. border.
When
McGuinty and his Liberal candidates come to your neighbourhood,
you may wish to ask him about how he can say he understands
the problems with urban sprawl, yet be in favour of a 1950s
expressway — a road that will destroy the green jewel
of Hamilton's east end, the Red Hill Valley.
Brian McHattie, Hamilton
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