iso_55 wrote:Hey, we all have our political viewpoints. I just think we allow our politicians & governments to interfere too much in our lives & affairs. I don't trust politicians or their motives. If there is a way to gouge us out of our hard earned money they find a way & unfortunately we let them do it.
For every one politician who goes into public service to try to do good, there are 500 or a thousand bad ones. Politicians that are in it for themselves. Be it for the money, greed, power or all three.
You need to be more consistent in your thought process, Iso. On one hand you want the government to legislate the size of vehicles and engines, and on the other hand you want them to stop interfering in our lives. Well, car companies sell what we will buy. No one holds a gun to our head and tells us to buy a Navigator.
You guys are also all wrong on this carbon tax. The Liberals are not grabbing more of our hard earned money. This tax is revenue neutral. Where they raise gas taxes by X amount, they are lowering other taxes by the same amount. It is a tax shift. You may disagree with this tax for ideological reasons, but be honest about the net effect on our collective pocket book.
There is a large segment of our population that is greatly concerned about global warming and pollution in general. I know that there is still some controversy about global warming, but the majority of people have accepted it as fact, and the government here is responding to those concerns.
We have lived for a great period of time in which we relied mainly on the horse and wagon and then the truck and car to get about. Fuel and raw materials were cheap. land was cheap. We got used to living on parcels of land at least 60 feet by 120 feet in size with a house in proportion to that. Well, things are changing, and it will be painful for a while to alter our lifestyle. In some places, everything is still being built based on roads and cars and single family homes. Rapid transit will never be cost effective in such a system. There will never be enough people in a given area to justify the huge expenditures required to give so few people in such a large area public transit that is acceptable to them.
You only have to look at Europe. Smaller homes. Smaller or no lots. Very dense neighbourhoods. Excellent public transit. Smaller cars, and fewer of them. Much higher road taxes and fuel prices than we have here, even with our new "carbon tax".
If you want to look at the future a bit closer to home, you only need to come to Vancouver. Everywhere there is a Skytrain station the towers are going up. People want to live close to fast, efficient transit. They are giving up their cars and their backyards in order to have some time outside of their daily commute. Densification does not cost much more for the additional public transit. The rails are there. The stations are there. All they need is more train cars. If the government puts too much money into highways, those people will be tempted to buy that bungalow 20 miles miles farther out from town instead and that might appeal to some, but it only works for so long. 20 miles of Skytrain costs a whack of money, as you have noted for C-Train in Calgary. So, you don't get C-Train or Skytrain 20 miles out. You get clogged highways and lousy bus service.
Calgary has exploded since I last lived there. The growth amazed me the last time I visited. There has been infill development in town, but for the most part people still are driving farther and farther to live in a single family home on a fenced lot. Well you can never do that and have public transit to satisfy them. It didn't work here and it won't work there.
In Vancouver we have had to come to grips with this a bit sooner than Calgary will. We cannot expand anymore. We have a border to the south of us, ocean to the west, mountains to the north and going east gobbles up some of the most valuable and productive farmland in the country. Smog is trapped in our Fraser valley and air pollution is becoming a problem. Global warming or not, something has to give.
Now, if something "has to be done" and we agree that government has to lead to some degree, then how do they go about it? You can't effectively legislate where people live or what they buy. But you can tax behaviours that are detrimental and reward those that are advantageous. Our society and culture responds to one thing only....money. So they have done the only thing that they can do, and the only thing that works and has ever worked. And that is to make something bad expensive and to try to make something good as cheap as possible. The market place is doing that in Vancouver already and government is moving with the times and with what people want.
I drive, and I need to drive, so this tax will cost me, to some degree. But the cost of fuel and any additional carbon taxes will cause me to reconsider some things in the future. I may feel like I need to do what I do now, but that's not really true. I do what I do because I can afford to, and because the company I work for can afford to subsidize it as well. But that can easily change and I will have to change to suit. Who's to say that the change isn't for the better?
Enough is enough.
If anything, here in Victoria, they like to cut lanes out and put in shrubbery filled medians, ostensibly for 'traffic calming'. When you're trying to move traffic to and from a large west coast naval base, having two 30km lanes of traffic (one each way, mind you! 
) does anything but calm the traffic. Another case of government (in this case, municipal) ignoring the wishes of the constituents, and doing what they think we need. 
