THE CASUAL GUYS LETTER TO CANDIDATE 1
Dear Candidate D,
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.
Build Municipality
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 and your planned focus on resolving it is long overdue. Developer, 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 Exit Road onramp you highlight as a priority is about vehicle accessibility. Community-minded citizens would certainly prefer to see improved livability over drivability.
Better 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.
Improve Community Safety
Your view of Community Safety seems to hinge on policing and “cracking down” on driving infractions. I don’t share your apparent convictions that this 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.
Fight to Keep Taxes Low
On a personal level, I’m certainly in favour of lower property taxes, but I don’t see anything in your platform to suggest how you intend to “fight”.
In my view, there is far too much speculation in the housing market, resulting in far too much vacancy. 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.
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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