York Region Doesn't Deserve Another Subway
Hey everyone! Politicians love flashy projects. If there's an opportunity for a photo op, they will be there. However, this obsession with capital projects instead of operations and maintenance leads to big facilities that are criminally underused (if you're interested in the topic of maintenance of urban systems, I recommend reading A City is not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences by Shannon Mattern). Ontario is ground-zero for this projects: huge infrastructure that is seldom used. I argue that York Region is a particularly bad example of this relationship. As they say, every decision is made in York Region, and this political clout has led to a huge amount of money allocated for physical infrastructures and little for actually making them work. As construction on the Yonge North Subway Extension to Richmond Hill Centre is set to begin, I argue that York Region is not deserving of this. Using examples of the subway extension to Vaughan, as well as the new Cornell Terminal,...