"... Miller was contrite about the city's failure to significantly implement the ambitious Bike Plan."I learned a lesson here. My approach was to say, the bike plan is underfunded, let's put money in the budget for it, which we did. We increased the funding I think by $1 million a year. And it didn't result in many more kilometres. And the lesson I learned is, the only way for the bike plan to succeed... is we have to bring the cycling community together with the neighbourhoods and get some strategic routes in the plan first. It has to be a political exercise, not a money exercise. We tried to do it with money and it hasn't worked because of local opposition so now we have to try to work with communities and cyclists," he said."
Via Inside Toronto
Tammy Thorne has written a great post on Spacing Votes Highly recommended.
4 comments:
ermmm... so what did the money buy?
Well, not much. For at least one year the money was not all spent and went back into general operating. Seriously. A budget/audit report from the city would be nice to look at but I have yet to see one.
How about clean house in the transport department while you are at it. Bring in some new blood and new approaches.
Should all be part of the plan although without real political will it's a almost impossible to change things. Now most folks in the Transport department know that the 'car experiment' didn't
work, but they need stable funding, political will/vision, less bureacracy and so on.
They know what other cities are doing, but they don't make the decisions.
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