https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OBhjdOJv2q4
In Toronto, let’s go through these garbage transportation, crime and policing. One of the things I’ve observed, let’s say on the garbage collection front, is that it’s switched from being a service provided by the city so that people can quickly and efficiently get rid of the things that are no longer necessary, and so the city can remain orderly and productive, to a moral play where every act of garbage disposal, let’s say, is freighted with the entire weight of saving the planet, and it’s become extremely expensive and time consuming. That would perhaps also be fine if there was some evidence, for example, that recycling plastics, which has been a big deal in Toronto, has actually worked in that they are recycled and done more good than harm, which by all evidence it hasn’t. And then on the transportation front, I started to notice probably 10 years ago that there was something weird going on in Toronto with regard to automobiles because the city seemed to be going out of its way to make driving in Toronto as annoying as possible. And for a long time, I thought that was just stupidity and the consequence of falling sway to the radicals in the, you know, I bike, therefore I’m saving the world crowd. But I started to understand, I’d like your thoughts on this, I started to understand more recently that there is a consortium of municipalities worldwide, I think they’re called C40 if I’ve got the acronym right, that do in fact have as a long term goal the radical reduction of private transportation, especially in anything that’s powered by fossil fuels, which is like everyone’s car. And so the war on automobiles and the continual multiplication of these bike lanes is driven by a very anti-development agenda. And I think it’s particularly pathological in Toronto because of course it’s an uninhabitable city on the climate front because it’s so bloody cold for five months of the year. And the only people that can use bike lanes regularly are like fit 20 to 25 year old men who actually don’t have anything better to do. And that’s not a very good group of what would you call constituents to design an entire city around. So let’s talk about, let’s talk a little bit about bike lanes and garbage collection and then maybe move to the catastrophe on the public transportation front that’s been unfolding for 20 years, for example, on Eglinton. Yeah. And you know what, going back to my saying that all politics is local, I’ve also found that the things that can cause you the most controversy on the issues you discuss are surprisingly local. The comments you just made on bike lanes might prove to be the most controversial comments you’ve ever made because that really gets people so irate. And I found that the bike lane discussion in Toronto is so polarizing because that small constituency of people who are really fixated on the bike lanes, oh boy, they hold it passionately. But the majority of people in Toronto say what you’re saying, that we’ve had enough with this obsession with putting bike lanes in every major road. And I came out with a press conference announcement the other week saying no more bike lanes on major roads. Look, I like biking. I go out with my kids. We do it on non-arterial roads. So there’s different side roads or roads that are adjacent to major roads where you could put a painted bike lane. But right now in Toronto, all of the bike lanes have these concrete block dividers where there’s such rigidity, the sort of free flowing flexibility. Oh, and they’re beautiful too. They’re absolutely beautiful. They’ve really done a great job on the aesthetics of the city to put up these bloody barriers that are totalitarian in their hideousness. And also those plastic tubes that obviously have a shelf life of about six months. They’re as hideous as anything could possibly be. And everyone listening who isn’t from Toronto, one of the things you need to know about Toronto is that the city’s laid out on a grid. And so there are roads everywhere like there are in Manhattan. It’s a grid. There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever ever to put bike lanes on a major thoroughfare because there are adjacent roads that are much underused, that are actually safer to bike on, that wouldn’t interfere with traffic. Particularly because in Toronto, the traffic is routed already away from residential areas to centralized feeder streets that feed the whole city. And many of them now have bike lanes on them, which all that seems to do, especially in the winter when there are no bikes whatsoever in the lanes, all it seems to do is snarl up traffic. And, you know, unfortunately, that’s a feature and not a bug because the point is, is to make people so frustrated with their vehicles that they decide to abandon them. And that’s a pretty, that’s an absolutely pathological, what would you say, demonstration of policy that the way you change people’s behavior is by inconveniencing them and irritating them unnecessarily while interfering with their economic productivity and driving polarization. You know, it’s no, and that’s the worst set of policies. That’s absolutely the approach here. Of course, people are very vocal about the idea that we want to limit people’s choice. But there are videos that have gone viral on social media where you see when you have those concrete block bike lanes means you only have two vehicle lanes. So there’s nowhere for the vehicles to go when an ambulance passes by. So lots of videos of an ambulance trying to get through. And then how do you make space for the ambulance? If you’ve made those bike lanes so rigid. So I’ve announced that on some of the streets, we’re going to have to tear up those posts you talk about to make room for vehicles to divert and any other situation. And some streets were just going to have to get rid of them entirely and put them on non-articular roads. Look, we’re all reasonable people, moderate folks. I mean, there’s options for all this sort of stuff. But the idea you have to sort of jam it all into one thoroughfare there. Take away the vehicular lanes. We’re building a new subway line. And I announced the other week that on those streets where we’ve got a major street, Queen Street that’s being shut down. And then there are other roads where obviously the traffic is going to spill over onto. And we have an entire lane taken up of a bike lane. We should open that up to vehicular traffic because then you can get transportation moving for the five years construction of this subway line, which to your point, January, February, March, which we pay many millions of dollars to actually clear the bike lanes in the winter when the ridership numbers are not zero, but they’re pretty darn close to zero. They’re a rounding error. Whether you’re feeling stressed, anxious, or simply seeking a moment of peace and tranquility, the Halo app has something for you. Halo offers an incredible range of guided meditations and prayers that are designed to help you deepen your spirituality and strengthen your connection to God. With Halo, you can explore different themes and types of prayer and meditation, such as gratitude, forgiveness, and centering prayer. You can also choose from different lengths of meditation to fit your schedule, whether you have a few minutes or an hour. 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And so if I ride a bike, then I’m saving the planet. And if you oppose me riding a bike, then you’re opposing saving the planet. And anybody who opposes saving the planet is obviously akin to an agent of Satan. And so now you have the polarization. And the thing that irritates me about that, or one of the many things that irritates me about that is that that has transformed the simple act of riding a bike, which should be just something you do with your family or you do because you can, in fact, use it to get from point A to B. It’s turned it into a kind of messianic moral crusade. And I should point out to all of you who are riding bikes and who think you’re saving the planet, you are not saving the planet by riding a bike. You’re just riding a bike. And so you should pull the morality out of that argument and put it back into the religious domain where it belongs. And we could actually have a sensible discussion about how we could integrate the multiple forms of transportation that now exist, including scooters, electric scooters and that sort of thing, with cars so that we could all get around, so that our ambulances could work, and so that we didn’t make every damn city street as hideous as possible in this counterproductive way, expensively, while doing absolutely no good.