GIVING THE BOOT TO BIKERS

DUMB MISTAKE SAVES MOTORISTS....FOR A CHANGE

Toronto motorists will take a slim victory even if it's caused by absentees and a dumb mistake. Still, the commendable vote turning down bike lanes on University Av. is just more proof that this council and its globe-trotting mayor should be pictured in dictionaries to illustrate the word dysfunctional.

The word means malfunction in structure. And that it is. Verbose, awkward, stupid, bureaucratic, posturing etc. etc. Think of any insult and throw it into the mix. The socialists, gliberals and inept pensioners on this council should all be put out to pasture this fall, but I doubt we will be that fortunate.

My views on bike lanes are well-known. Just in case, I wrote about them again in columns last year on May 22 and June 3 and this year on April 15.

I have always felt the same about bike lanes, an incredibly expensive way to screw up traffic and accommodate a few cyclists for about the half year when the weathe is tolerable. I was accused by one friend/fanatic who rode to a downtown hospital of waiting until my son Brett took his honeymoon to launch one attack on bikes, because Brett often bikes to work.

If you want to bike to work, fine by me. Just don't do it on main streets during rushhour and expect motorists, cops and the bureaucracy to accommodate you with your own special reserved space.

This idea of an experiment this summer with bike lanes on University Ave. - which would have been the ultimate in the cyclist crusade - was almost welcomed by me as a concept so silly that it might actually trigger a successful revolt by council's minority and the public against the costly spread of bike lanes through a city road network that already didn't work.

But it got rejected in a squeaker of vote with Councillor Paula Fletcher, a bike-lane supporter, voting against, blaming fatique and the fact she just doesn't quite know how to operate the two voting buttons that she has pushed for years.

It also got defeated because 17 of the councillors weren't there for the evening vote. I suspect some concocted excuses just so they could duck the issue. For lefties, voting against bikes is a little like kicking a saint, but they must have known in their gut that it was a bizarre misused of road space and that many voters in their wards would be furious.

Ducking a vote is almost as bad as taking a bribe. Hiding in the toilet or pretending that you have to show visiting relatives the town is a betrayal of your voters who expect that for $100,000 a year, you might actually stay in your seat.

It's important for every councillor to vote on such issues, no matter what excuse they can dream up, because bike lanes are almost iconic in their symbolism. Just how far does a city go in contorting its infrastructure to accommodate a mouthy minority when the huge majority of users of city streets, including transit with hundreds of thousands of passengers, will be delayed.

My wife and I drove along Bloor St. at 7.30 a.m. recently for early medical appointments. Normally we would take the subway but I was going on to the cottage, and you can't take transit to the Kawarthas. It's something the lefty bitching about motorists forget. Many people make a number of calls in a day, not just one trip to a job. And you can't deliver couches and cases of pop on the bus.

So there we were zipping along Bloor except for blocks where there were one or two cyclists or perhaps an illegally parked car. You put two people on two bikes in one block of Bloor and effectively you close one lane of traffic. Sure, as the cyclists say, there is only one person in many of those cars but there are far more cars needing to use that disabled lane than there are cyclists.

I won't praise Fletcher for pushing the wrong button to be with the winning 15-vote majority. But I will the others: Ainslie, Ashton, Del Grande, Grimes, Hall, Holyday, Kelly, Lindsay-Luby, Minnan-Wong, Moeser, Nunziata, Palacio, Parker and Perruzza.

The 13 who wanted the lanes (in this case the number really is evil) were: Augimeri, Davis, De Baeremaeker, Gimabrone, Heaps, McConnell, Mihevic, Moscoe, Pantalone, Perks, Rae, Saundercook and Vaughan.

We should also condemn the 17 who were absent. This was a major issue, certainly so in symbolism, and you expect councillors to be around unless they're in ER. Mayor David Miller wasn't there because most of the time he is busy burnishing his image in the world, not this city. Then the rest: Milczyn, Bussin, Carroll, Cho, Di Georgio, Feldman, Fillion, Ford, Jenkins, Mammoliti, Lee, Ootes, Shiner, Stintz, Thompson and Walker.

It would be nice if most of those were absent all the time from council. Same with the unholy 13. Come to think of it, even though there are some bright, hard-working honourable conservatives, it would be useful and appropriate if most of council's 45 members never returned.

What we need is more of them running for mayor, because then we get stuck with only one.

CNIB VISIONS

IGNITING YOUR SENSES

There I was pushing my fingers through the raspberry sorbet at a $350-a-plate dinner and no one at the table was complaining.
In fact, no one noticed. But then they were wearing blindfolds - although a couple were sneaking peaks I suspect - and I was wearing a blindfold without cheating, so I had no idea what part of my dessert I was pawing. A couple of truffle balls slipped away but I managed to grab them before they hit the tablecloth.
It was a culinary treasure hunt. It was also a lot of fun. It also taught all the diners at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind headquarters on Bayview Ave. about what the blind and the partially sighted among us face every day, when not being able to see is not just a temporary lesson from being blindfolded but a fact of life that is to be endured and then to be conquered.
The dinner was titled Visions Gala 2010, the first of what is hoped to be an eternal annual event on behalf of the CNIB. It raised more than $50,000 as the organizers lived up to its theme of "Ignite Your Senses" by presenting us with the Alata Harmonia Chorus of Canada singing the music of blind composers and blind virtuoso performances by pianist Nat Giangioppo and singer Becka deHann.
The food was great, prepared by Compass Group, but the evening only lived up to its billing of "exploration, discovery and delight" - the words of John Rafferty, the CNIB president - when after the black cod and beef tenderloin we had that "trio of the senses' desert served in the dark.
It looks like just another photo opportunity for politicians but when the world that doesn't have a disability is confronted with the hassles of dealing with one, we all benefit.
So it was a few days early when Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman trundled around in a wheelchair to experience the dumb hurdles created by the thoughtless. In Ottawa, one of the new senators, Vim Kochhar, was doing the same. And such "stunts" were happening in most Canadian cities.
By now the public is used to the pictures, but they should try to get used to helping our disabled neighbours conquer the barricades which too many of them have to confront daily, whether on transit or in public buildings.
Vim Kochhar is a veteran in these battles on behalf of the physically disabled as the spark behind the Canadian Foundation for Physically Disabled Persons and the Canadian Disabled Hall of Fame. (I wrote about the hall last Oct. 27 as we created it out of the Terry Fox Hall after the Fox family because jealously protective of Terry's name.)
Oh yes, it was the best dessert that I've had in a series of formal dinners, that is if the dry cleaners manage to get all of the spots out of my jacket.

WHERE WILL THE NEWS COME FROM?

WHO DOES THE DIGGING?

It would be a hot topic around the Toronto press club bar but press clubs everywhere have disappeared faster than reporting jobs and media revenue.

Just who is going to cover events in the future and produce the foundation of basic reporting on which the tottering superstructure of bloggers, columnists and commentators rest?

I doubt that some bloggers have thoughts greater than one ungrammatical put-down paragraph. But the poor man's columnists, plus all the hotline hosts and TV talking heads, really can't function unless someone actually goes to the meetings or digs up the dirt or covers the trials or wades through the crisis or interviews the movers and crooks and cops.

Journalism isn't falling out of bed and sitting down at the computer in your undies and firing off an insult about a story you just heard on radio or TV. You just can't take the lint in your belly button and weave together enough of a story to support even a bad rant. There has to be a writer somewhere who actually wrote the first story for a newspaper, because, as is well known, the news on TV and radio is stolen 99.9% from newspapers.

And lately, the poor reporters, the foot soldiers of the media, have become an endangered species as fat corporations figure that a few columnists, wire service copy, inventive editors and some pictures will just be the thing to keep the ads apart. Oh yes, sports too, because it's easy to cover and you can fill a lot of space with action pictures and stories even of practises. Movie reviews are also a cinch, compared to the nitty gritty of winkling the truth out of bureaucracy.

Jon Stewart, the comedian who is one of the best critics of media around, had Jon Meacham, the Editor of Newsweek, on his show the night that it was announced that the veteran news magazine is going to be sold. The graffiti scrawled on the wall says it will fold.

Meacham felt that only the venerable Economist was making money among such magazines and that maybe the best thing is to concentrate on producing good daily coverage of events for the Internet and then package the best of that for a magazine to be printed weekly for those who like to hold news in their hands. After all, reading the computer in the tub is not recommended.

The important part of the interview was Stewart and Meacham worrying about just where the basic fodder in news was going to come from if newspapers and magazines continue to languish and their staffs continue to be decimated as the bosses try to keep afloat.

For Southern Ontario, there are textbook examples of the squeeze on reporters and news coverage. The National Post is so slim some days that you wonder why they bother. The Toronto Sun is being squeezed like a dish rag so that Quebecor can get every last buck out of it to pay for its dismal management.

There doesn't seem to be a month when there aren't major firings and layoffs and closings and mergers as news rooms and press halls and call centres are crimped and shuffled and combined.

The Sun is reshuffing columnists and beats, presumably to cover the yawning absence of reporters. Ironically, it is returning to its roots, before it was cash cow,, when basically it was a paper of columnists and not much else.

The Sun rose like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Toronto Telegram, when the beloved Tely was folded by the Bassett family to make some money. The Tely featured a half-dozen columnists that were often the talk of the town. So the Sun's founders, basically Doug Creighton and Peter Worthington, decided out of necessity to go the Tely one better and make columnists the backbone of the new tabloid. In fact, the legs and arms too.

For example, until 1985, I wrote a daily column on politics on Page 4. I was said to be a City Hall columnist but actually I covered politics at every level, walking between City Hall and the Legislature and flying to Ottawa for throne speeches, elections and budgets. Generally there was no other coverage of the same events for the first few years.

With Worthington, the eternal columnist, and Doug Fisher, the dean of the Press Gallery, completing our political triumvirate, no one seemed to notice that we really had no political reporters, especially with Bob MacDonald functioning more as a bare-knuckle columnist.

In Sports, we had George Gross leading a trusty band of columnists. In Entertainment, George Anthony covered movies and North America like a champagne-soaked blanket. Joan Sutton strutted on high heels around the LifeStyle world and stared down society.

It all worked, and the Sun confounded its critics. But each year reporters were added and in time the Sun resembled a mature newspaper where editors actually had assistants and there might actually be more than just one reporter on a beat.

Now the Sun is setting in that area, and columnists are shouldering more of the hard news load.

But there can be problem when you rely on your big columnists to always provide the major, and sometimes the only, coverage of big stories.

One of the charms of being a columnist is the freedom to pontificate about whatever takes your interest. You don't, or shouldn't, assign columnists. If the editors keep calling up columnists and telling them to write on a specific event, then the columnist is just another feature writer and the job is no longer as attractive.

This will come as a shock to all the kids who show up and tell the interviewing editors that they would like to be a columnist but the best columnists have a decade or so of tough service first as reporters and editors. They should be among the newspaper's best reporters but that doesn't mean they want to function as a reporter. Where's the fun in not being able to call the mayor a super mouth?

We face a challenging time for those of us who like our commentary to come with the icing of real facts. Imagine the despair of all the spielers and bloggers out there if they actually have to do some digging themselves and find that trials can last for weeks and a political debate for an eternity. Journalism isn't just ripping off the facts from others and saying what you think about them.

The free ride can't last forever. The outfits who still employ a few reporters will figure out eventually how to recover some of their costs from the Internet and the death spiral for media will cease.

MY ESCAPE FROM LIFE

THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like my cottage bench.
I dream and watch the Trent River from it for hours. Hassles of the Big Smoke that is Toronto burn away like the morning mist under the June sun.
I escape to it in my mind from any corner of the world. When the spirit feels battered by the awful sights of the refugee camp. When the plane is delayed for another three hours. When the visitors become as tedious as feared.
Most of us have a peaceful hatch in our mind when we need a magic carpet to flee misery. In Dan Brown's latest bestseller, The Lost Symbol, his hero, Robert Langford, imagined that he was lying beneath a vast night sky when he battled his crippling claustrophobia.
I still have the bench I bought 30 years ago. It's rotting and sagging but the kids perch in it to watch the evening fire and roast gooey treats. The second bench is just a memory. It was so fine, it was poached. And the current one looks like it was cut out with axe but it's a comfortable sit, and that's more important than looks.
Yet the second was a thing of beauty. A Costco kit for around $119 that sat under a leak in the boat house for years when my enthusiasm waned within minutes of the purchase. . One rainy day, my procrastination had become silly even to me. So I ripped open the rotting cardboard to find the boards were just fine but the instructions had a hole in the middle from mildew.
But the French version was fine. So I phoned the daughter-in-law in California. She is so francophone, the Plains of Abraham were named after one of her ancestors - her family lived on the edge - and the composer of our stirring anthem, Calixa Lavallee, was another relative. Marie translated, through giggles, my atrocious French, so for once that compulsory duplicate French instruction was useful.
My wife and I did everything right. Soaked the boards in various preservatives before assembly with really good screws and carpenter's glue. My finest assembly yet, after cursing Ikea for years.
Great to sit in. And we celebrated with the first of, we hoped, many cold beers. Maybe some tea too.
Then came the cold November night and my eternal search for some plump pickerel. I groped through the gloom to the end of the point and made my first cast. Lost the minnow. Cursed that I hadn't brought a flashlight out but backed up to my bench to sit and bait the hook again. I went sprawling. Someone had stolen the bench on which I had spent so much time.
My theory is that the louts who occasionally float in party barges off the point and curse and drink beer and maybe even fish figured it would be a great lark if they liberated my bench. So they clambered over the rocks that edge the point and shoved it aboard their pontoon boat. Too bad they didn't break a leg.
Of course I had branded it with my initials in a secret nook. So I searched up and down both sides of the Trent. No luck. Just irate dogs. So I added the bench to the strange assortment of stuff that I've had stolen over the years, which includes a wheel barrow and aquarium.
The river that runs through my life is as magnetic as a fireplace when it comes to staring and dreaming. A big fish jumps. The carp school in sex play. A loon keeps company, our two solitudes not meeting but not at war either. The lights come on in the cottage and the choice now is between the assaults of the bugs and falling asleep before the TV.
Give the kings their thrones. I'll take the cottage bench and the river and my thoughts....

THE MEDIA SCANDAL OVER GOLDMAN

Getting Too Used To Crooks

The disgusting thing about the Goldman scandal is how tolerant the business and investing media are in saying it was just business as usual. Ho hum!

I've listened with revulsion while writers for the Globe and the Post have said in their papers and on the BNN TV channel that Goldman really shouldn't have pulled that scam on investors but, hey, the investors were big boys too and, gee, that's how it's been going for decades on Bay St. and Wall St.

So the crime is not in stealing from people but being found out. And if you brazen it out in hearings and pretend that you have to get big bonuses or you would go to another den of thieves, then the politicians will let you get away with it, providing the political contributions keep coming from the armies of lobbyists.

There are exceptions, but many financial commentators don't expect any securities body to do much in punishing Goldman Sachs or any other company and really don't think that's awful.

So the financial media is as out-of-touch with the ordinary Joes and Janes about how scandalized they are about the stock market shenanigans as Bay St. and Wall St. There is a Grand Canyon between Wall Street and Main Street.

Financial institutions had little credibility with the public and they certainly have none now. No one loves a banker, and stock brokers are a mysterious breed too, but at least there was a feeling that if you were careful, you could make a little money for a rainy day.

It has been proven rather conclusively that the big financial outfits considered us all as suckers to be disemboweled of every last buck, and they included their colleagues in that too. There is no honour among thieves, as Bay St. and Wall St. have just proven again. These guys weren't just about to steal all our savings for a rainy day, they wanted the umbrella and the rubbers and anything else they could rip off our carcasses.

Ironically, such a flawed commentator as Eliot Spitzer, who is trying to resurrect a career out of the beds of expensive hookers, wrote tough comments on Goldman and the fellow travellers. He said: "Now that we are seeing the inner workings of the products that Goldman is marketing, we must ask whether Goldman and other investment banks do deserve the huge public subsidies they have received. Do they do anything that has any real social value?"

There has been a lot of wonder about that lately. Are Goldman and the others just immoral operators of casinos? Or it is really, as the commentators insist, just the way our financial world has worked, works now, and will work eternally.

Yet isn't it strange that we have to go to the disgraced former governor of New York State to hear tough views about that, but the typical business columnist has the attitude of let the big boys look after themselves and if the rest of us are smart, we would invest only in mutual funds and pay those hefty annual fees.

Why even the great guru who walks on water, if it's in Coke, Warren Buffet, has come to Goldman's defence. It would be believable if Buffet didn't have a huge investment in Goldman, something like $5 billion. Buffet is used to big bets, and winning, like on Coke, but even such a respected sage can't be trusted when he's put $5 billion where his critical mouth should be.

I was disappointed that contrarian Terence Corcoran, the Post editor who loves to swim against majority opinion, didn't gut the Goldman crooks for me. I'm a fan of Corcoran and when I was Editor of the Toronto Sun tried to hire him. The Sun owned the Post at the time, and I could pay him at least 20% more than he was getting, but the Posties loved to regard Sun staffers as swimmers in pond scum.

Tolerance for cheats is something I don't understand. But then the National Post uses columns by Conrad Black, languishing deservedly in prison. Black was a con artist right from high school but he still managed to trap many of us, and I was one, into losing thousands with his companies. I asked the Post brass why they had the gall to have Black as a regular columnist after his dismal record and the lofty reply was that readership surveys showed him right up at the top. Apparently Post readers have a great tolerance for cheating too.

The best line about Black was given by Hal Jackman, the former lieutenant-governor and multi millionaire with nearly 30 companies. Jackman said that Black was a friend of his but he would never dream of investing with him.

When I was a kid reporter and occasionally covered annual financial meetings, my older colleagues talked about how big a crap shoot the Toronto Stock Exchange was. They talked about boiler room operations and Ponzi schemes and con men. But then some of them made a lot of money on a northern mine. So I've been investing for four decades and done okay except for the occasional mysterious bankruptcy. Yet when I sample the sloppy coverage of the North American financial media and survey the financial carnage of the last few years, I consider myself lucky.

No one is prepared to be a real watchdog with more bite than bark, to savage the liars when the big boys concoct another fraud that no one, including themselves, really understands. And when politicians keep stopping short of real reform and huge fines, it makes me feel humble because I managed not to be taken in, but I had a good broker.

Dealing with financial institutes without a good broker riding shotgun is like jumping into the lions' den and pulling the tail of the nearest big cat. The wonder is that some humble investors still manage to survive with any profit at all.

PASSPORT TREASURE HUNT

ISN'T ANYONE CHECKING?

I know bureaucrats think the federal government is in the taxation business but the way it is supposed to work in a democracy is that the feds are in the service business.

Every time I get involved with federal red tape, I wonder if any boss ever checks out a service from A to Z to see how things are working.

I went to renew my passport for my wife and I and found, fortunately, by checking the Canadian passport site on the Internet that things are a lot simpler if you have already had a passport. Which is the way it should be.

So I threw away the forms that my wife had collected at the border and downloaded simpler forms from the Internet that didn't require a guarantor to sign the back of pictures etc.

I also got the addresses for the nearest two passport offices.

Off I went one fine morning for the office at 377 Burnhamthorpe Rd. East in Mississauga. I had used the office once before, so I had a faded memory.

I found the usual as I drove along Burhamthorpe, since most buildings there are oriented away from the street and the noise. Street numbers, the most useful thing you can have on your buildings, were in hiding.

So I drove west and west and west, trying to see a street number. Finally I reached a plaza that I vaguely remember might be 'home free,' my destination. Drove around and around the parking lot looking for a number. None to be seen. Saw a post office sign and thought someone there might know the street address of where they were. Hunted in vain. Went into the plaza's main doors and found, believe it or not, a sign for the passport office on the second floor. Wandered around and around and finally found the stairs.

The usual crammed interior awaited me, as it does in all government offices, but things were handled in an elaborate electronic way with flashing numbers sorting out the waiters. There are preliminary desks where they doublecheck your forms before you endure the wait, 30 minutes or more. I said to that clerk that it would be nice if there was actually a street number for the plaza and exterior signs for the passport office itself.

No comments. She continued to look bored.

When I finally got to the passport window, the clerk shuffled through the two forms and I handed over the old passports and my VISA card.

"How are you going to pay for this," she asked? "With the VISA card that you have," I said. "Oh," she said.

She asked for my driver's licence for identification purposes. I told her she already had my old passport, which was still valid, plus two pages of signatures and forms and new pictures, so it did seem I had established who I was.

But, hey, when you're dealing with a government agency, you're lucky if they don't ask you to produce your first-born as collateral.

Besides, the teller at my local TD bank, located on the corner where I've been dealing with banks and trust companies for nearly 50 years, asked me recently for identification.

I spluttered indignantly that I had just deposited $12,000 in cheques into my account and had my bankbook. (Believe me, the money didn't last long before it went for bills.) If he didn't need my identification to accept $12,000 in cheques, why did he need my identification when I was withdrawing a piffling $200? There was some dumb explanation which I don't accept.

But back to the passport office. When I was finished, I said to the clerk that it really didn't make much sense to have an elaborate Internet site and to give the street addresses for the passport office when this particular office was located anonymously in a plaza that had no street number that I could find.

She warmed up. She said everyone working there thought the lack of identification was dumb and that there was no need to make the office sort of the goal in a treasure hunt.

Of course that would be too elementary for the civil servants in charge, that they actually made it simple for people to find the office so they could hand over the tedious forms and the hefty $87 fee.

Canadian passports are notorious for having been used by spies, terrorists and assassins throughout the world for more than a century. I doubt that we are going to keep our passports out of criminal hands just by making it difficult to find the office.

BIKES SCREWING CARS

MORE TRANSIT, LESS BIKE LANES

There is good news and bad news about this proposal to put bike lanes along University, Toronto's major ceremonial avenue.

If the silly leftist majority of Toronto council actually does something that dumb, more Torontonians will wake up to the fact we are ruled by loonies. Could make election day more challenging!

Is there nothing that councillors won't do to screw motorists?

The bike nuts see this a wonderful summer pilot project which will lead to more bike lanes on more Toronto major streets.

I think they have bit off more than the long-suffering public can chew.

For starters, roads must be built to a far higher standard than bike paths. Paths in parks are a good idea and don't have to have an intensive underpad. Bike paths on the side of roads that are so costly to construct is economic lunacy. Yet a bankrupted city has to pay around $4 million a year because the bike nuts, generally socialists who don't give a damn about citizens/motorists, want bike lanes to run down every major street in a sprawling city.

Second, traffic is already obscenely congested because of all the shenanigans of council's left, such as interfering with turns, signals, intersection constrictions, the measle epidemic of stop signs, one-way mazes, mischievous bus stop locations etc.

Since all TTC vehicles other than subway trains use this congested network of roads, any interference with the traffic flow of cars and trucks also interferes with the flow of buses and streetcars. Surely that is elementary, but not to the stolid Dr. Watsons of council.

This proposal has brought an interesting reaction from Giorgio Mammoliti, who is running for mayor. Mammoliti has been a florid expensive MPP and now councillor, and he has never seen an expense account from the public that he hasn't wanted to goose in his favour, but his idea of a $20 or $30 registration fee for bikes is interesting.

After all, if the cyclists want to have more rights on the roads, let them pay for it, like the motorists do and do and do.

It should be a token $10 for kids and seniors, but $30 is appropriate for adults. The registration number would be useful in soothing the epidemic of stolen bikes. And, of course, enforcement could be non-aggressive, except for adults riding bikes in bike lanes.

I hate to have more bureaucracy and more forms but if the cyclists want to ride with the big boys, then they have to pay their share, and it would be nice if they honoured the traffic rules too.

As I wrote in columns last year in June and May, there really isn't that great a use of bike lanes, except by in-your-face activists and politicians.

After all, in the old line about our weather, Canada has 10 months of winter and two months of bad skiing. So who in their right mind from early December to late April is going to use bike lanes on a regular basis?

You have to be as nutty as Councillor Glenn DeBaermaeker who rides incredible distances to City Hall each day to plan the next goofy wasteful scheme to rob the taxpayers.

So let the city measure the use of bike lanes. It is routine to put a rubber tube gadget down to measure the flow of cars along a street. Let them put the same gadgets on bike lanes, and if the bikes and riders aren't heavy enough to trigger them, let them do an eyeball count.

I have found on the expensive bike lanes that hinder traffic on Royal York Rd near where I live that cyclists are a rare sight. I'm with the Toronto Star columnist who counted only 15 bicyclists on a trip along Wellesley, down Sherbourne to the waterfront, then along the waterfront to Yonge St.

Of course the time of day would have a lot to do with it. And the weather. Except the roads are hindered by the bike lanes on cold wet days, whether it's night or rushhour.

The bike community, of course, have figures about use that are so exaggerated, they should make a councillor laugh, except most of our lefty/mushy politicians don't live in the real world with the rest of us but in some strange creation where the championship of ideas is more important than the cost, where grumbles from taxpayers are put down to malcontents who don't know how lucky they are to live in a community ruled by enlightened civic deep thinkers.

The reason bikes lanes are important is they are iconic symbols for the left and a thorn for the motorists and residents who already pay more than their share of this city's operation, that is if you want to pretend that this city really works.

Councillors at the committee when the bike lanes for University were approved put a great deal of importance on the fact that only one person, a motor league official, showed up to protest such a decision. Except the comment in the media was hostile. And there are many people in this city who can't take the time off work to attend a city committee meeting which can last most of a day, although it often seems like a week. There was also a poll that showed considerable opposition to bike lanes, although they got more support than I expected. Maybe people didn't understand the question. There is also the problem that most people don't answer polls, which makes them of limited value.

The anti-car jerks of council are so strident, they actually planned to put bike lanes on the Front St. extension, which was killed as a project because the anti-car jerks drove the cost so high. So why do I bring up bike lanes on those proposed ramps? Because legally you can't ride bikes on the Gardiner expressway, so these were bike lanes to nowhere.

Suitable, somehow, because that's the general direction of this council's majority. If only they would stick to the basic business of running a city, which is too boring for them, so as a result we have an infrastructure that is rotting and rusty and sinking. Too bad those councillors won't follow.