More Raving!

The following was printed in The Citizen sometime in June, about a City editorial about the issue of downtown parking....

I would like readers to note how it's all well and good for a Citizen editorial to say how great it is that downtown parking is becoming more difficult and expensive when The Citizen is itself located in a suburban commercial area right next to the freeway and one of the original "big box" stores, which they should also note is a concept that originated in supposedly superior, all-but-car-free Europe.

In a modern decentralized city like Ottawa there are few reasons for anyone who doesn't work there--which is most people in this city--to ever venture "downtown" at all. Making it less convenient to get downtown will not compel people to want to move there and open up their wallets for billion-dollar train projects, they will just go elsewhere. That's what personal transportation enables people to do, it empowers them to thwart the meticulous schemes of fad- and authoritarianism-worshipping "planners" who, among other sins, once saw those drab concrete high rise apartments blighting the cityscape as the heart of a Utopian vision of a perfect society, imported from the USSR.