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St. Clair ROW is a go!
The TTC has gotten approval to start construction on the St. Clair Right of Way. Hopefully this ends the protracted legal squabble that had more twists and turns than a John Grisham novel, including a decision overturned because one of the judges had a conflict of interest. Torontoist, has strongly supported faster, better transit and honestly doesn’t feel that a ROW will destroy the neighbourhood like the folks at Save Our St. Clair claims. Inconvenience cars and deliveries maybe, but destroy a whole neighbourhood? Last time I checked the best way to do that was not fixing gridlock and by pushing a heavy amount of traffic onto your streets.
Spacing Wire beats everyone on this story but BikingToronto’s Joe Travers has some insightful albeit pro-cycling analysis. We want to pull out a particularly juicy piece of analysis from his post:
The Divisional Court’s decision first mentions that the Ontario Municipal Board ruled on Jan 26th of this year that while the new Official Plan wasn’t “official” in the formal sense, it was still valid in terms of urban planning theory (I’m heavily paraphrasing here).
So in practice the new Official Plan isn’t official but in theory it’s in practice? Yes, we’re confused too but that’s why we’re not lawyers.