THE CASUAL GUY'S LETTER TO CANDIDATE 1
Dear Candidate T,
I’m a 10-year resident in Municipality’s Neighborhood area. I didn’t have much time to plan my family’s move to City and the market at the time was of a nature that didn’t permit me to explore many options, so I didn't do much comparison of Neighborhood to other City neighborhoods. I’d like to express to you my observations gleaned over the last 10 years as they relate to the priorities as listed on your website.
Stop the Speeding
To combat speeding, your focus, it seems, will be on increased enforcement, automated speed enforcement, and increased public awareness. I don’t share your apparent convictions that these will bring about positive behaviour. Indeed, based on my travels in other jurisdictions, I’ve found that the most effective solutions to speeding are 1) road design and 2) traffic calming measures.
City designs its roads to an outdated North American standard that isn’t conducive to safe driving. Our streets are wide and the only passive traffic control measures we employ are in the form of static street signs and traffic lights. Our comfortable roadways invite complacency, requiring costly solutions in the form of policing and technology to solve the problem we created in the first place.
Instead, roads can be constructed narrower than they are. At key intersections, curbs can narrow busy roads to force drivers to slow down. I live at a busy intersection. When I’ve complained about drivers’ disregard for traffic signals, a police vehicle parked in front of my home was ready to catch offenders. The increased police presence worked for a day or two, but bad driving behaviour persisted after that.
The traditional, expensive solutions (including more police) have failed and will continue to fail. Innovative, effective, frugal solutions already exist and should be explored for application in Neighborhood.
Public Transit
As a user of Public Transportation Company’s services, I appreciate your focus in this area and I support your platform. It currently takes me about 1¼ hours (one-way) to get to my place of employment using public transportation. In rush hour, my drive would be 45 minutes. If not for the fact that I enjoy the reading time, I would abandon public transportation in favour of driving myself through my commute.
Invest in Our Community
The three points you identify for community investment on your website are very valid. Having lived in several places in eastern Canada and abroad, I can attest that City’s community development is comparatively poor. Home construction is prioritized over infrastructure to support new communities. Secondary roads are expanded to accommodate more traffic many years after they’re needed. The Arterial Road realignment is a great example of this lack of foresight. Developer, for example, the developer who built most of Neighborhood and other neighboring sectors, should have been required to develop this secondary infrastructure in conjunction with building homes, parks, etc.
A key component to meaningful community development is walkability. Today, a resident of Neighborhood, an urban community, who doesn’t want to drive, must walk about 30 minutes to buy a loaf of bread, carton of milk, or fresh produce. Some residents must walk 20 minutes to get to the nearest bus route. While it’s great to be able to walk to the Local complex for recreation, the only commercial centre was added this year on Arterial Road near Crossroad Dr., still a 30-minute walk for most residents in the subdivision. And the meagre size of that commercial centre is far too small to accommodate Municipality south of the Small River.
The bulk of your community investment strategy, disappointingly, is centred around vehicle accessibility. Community-minded citizens would certainly prefer to see improved livability over drivability.
Lower Taxes
On a personal level, I’m certainly in favour of lower property taxes. You are opposed to so-called “free” transit. While I can appreciate that point of view (and once would have shared it), the reality is that a robust transit system benefits much more than transit users. More users on transit equates to fewer vehicles on the road, less traffic congestion, and greatly reduces the need (and cost) to build and maintain traffic infrastructure. Property taxes are a very fair way to finance a comprehensive transit system and places the traffic burden on all citizens for the benefit of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians alike. We need to do all we can to encourage public transit.
Like other cities, City is victim to property costs that have increased much, much more steeply than inflation and wages. For my own children, owning a home is challenging at best and completely out of reach at worst. There is far too much speculation in the housing market. Vacancy tax should be implemented on all vacant properties and undeveloped land (other than land designated for agricultural purposes). Tax speculators and developers more and reduce the tax burden on the middle class, small property owners.
Safe Streets
While policing is an important part of public safety and security, it’s often overstated. I strongly suspect that services ancillary to policing are grossly underfunded. Mental health issues abound. Drug addiction is far too common. Both of these factors, among several others, give rise to crime. Funding needs to be allocated to build and enhance proven successful programs that can operate in tandem with a qualified police force, and not rely so heavily on police intervention.
In conclusion, I applaud your sense of civic responsibility. I hope that the perspectives I’ve shared in this email letter resonate with you to some degree and that you’ll consider them in both your platform and, should you win the upcoming election, in your service to our community.
Kind regards,
The Casual Guy
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