12-05-2017, 11:53 AM
"It brings a future infrastructure component forward in time"
This only means something if you then reallocate the future funding towards the same thing. If you buy $1M of cycling infrastructure a year, and get $1M to bring 2019 infrastructure into 2018, but then when 2019 comes around you skip cycling investment because it was brought forward, then you've actually removed $1M of cycling investment for the "benefit" of bringing something online 1 year early.
"It funds a project that we didn't have funds allocated for"
This means that you don't take cycling seriously. Either you now get to fund something you otherwise wouldn't have (because it wasn't a great investment, like how some view our bikeshare system), or you took a critical piece of cycling infrastructure and let its existence depend on the whims of upper-level government, meaning you didn't care about it in the first place. Makes for a good comparison between how we did our LRT system (put forward 1/3 of the cost, unlike municipalities expecting to pay $0, built funding from other governments into the planning process and not assuming they would come), compared to places like Hamilton where they're stalling for years around the idea of a *free* LRT system, or Scarborough where they hummed and hawed about a free LRT, eventually pushed foolishly into the subway situation they're in now, and haven't done a single bit of work in the better part of a decade, let alone planned and budgeted for the costs of it to the city.
This only means something if you then reallocate the future funding towards the same thing. If you buy $1M of cycling infrastructure a year, and get $1M to bring 2019 infrastructure into 2018, but then when 2019 comes around you skip cycling investment because it was brought forward, then you've actually removed $1M of cycling investment for the "benefit" of bringing something online 1 year early.
"It funds a project that we didn't have funds allocated for"
This means that you don't take cycling seriously. Either you now get to fund something you otherwise wouldn't have (because it wasn't a great investment, like how some view our bikeshare system), or you took a critical piece of cycling infrastructure and let its existence depend on the whims of upper-level government, meaning you didn't care about it in the first place. Makes for a good comparison between how we did our LRT system (put forward 1/3 of the cost, unlike municipalities expecting to pay $0, built funding from other governments into the planning process and not assuming they would come), compared to places like Hamilton where they're stalling for years around the idea of a *free* LRT system, or Scarborough where they hummed and hawed about a free LRT, eventually pushed foolishly into the subway situation they're in now, and haven't done a single bit of work in the better part of a decade, let alone planned and budgeted for the costs of it to the city.