The Globe’s Marcus Gee brings us a good column today. His writing’s been inspired since the Ford win. If nothing else, the next four years are going to be glory days for newspaper columnists.
Of Metrolinx, Gee writes:
Metrolinx [is] a bureaucratic animal whose role is to study and advise and implement decisions, not make them. Its leaders, chairman Rob Prichard and chief executive Bruce McCuaig, no doubt have their opinions about what kind of transit would be best for Toronto. Mr. McCuaig told me, for example, that the projected demand for transit on Sheppard is about one-fifth the level that would justify a subway on paper. But Metrolinx is looking more and more like a cipher in the transit debate, with no heft of its own.
Metrolinx is the most interesting player in this whole Transit City debate because, on their end, it’s a fight to be relevant. One of Metrolinx’s reasons for being was to allow for long-term, apolitical transit planning in the GTA. If they get steamrolled by Ford, they’ve proven themselves generally useless.
Which helps to explain why the official Metrolinx Twitter account has been touting the virtues of Transit City-style light rail for the past few weeks:
