General Road and Highway Discussion

[Acitta]

This is about Toronto, but I think that the commentary applies anywhere. 

The battle over the Bathurst Street bus lane is really about preserving the privileges of the status quo

Some day in the future, archeologists sifting through the remnants of our city might conclude that we were a people who loved our dogs, but worshipped our parking spots. They might speculate that the parking spots lining our roadways served as sentries awaiting the return of a messiah. Or even suggest that this worship bordered on idolatry, with parking spots alongside dwellings treated as sacred spaces; the size of domestic structures that housed parking spots the measure of a person’s piety. The archeologists would be awed by the gigantic vaults excavated beneath commercial and residential towers for parking spots, and marvel at the hectares of parking spots created by paving over fertile lands. Parking spots were more valued than human sustenance. They might theorize that this idolatry sparked resistance, though find little evidence of its success. Perhaps they would conclude that when the decline began, wrought by searing heat waves, floods, insect plagues, and wildfires, the society’s high priests — perhaps to appease an angry deity — proposed a colossal waterfront monument to the parking spot, pipelines across the land to fuel cars to stand idle in parking spots, and giant caverns under motorways to speed idolaters to parking spots.