The Attention Span of a Retarded Gnat

Vincent J. Curtis

13 Jan 15

My hometown newspaper has recently run editorials in support of the proposed Light Rail Transit project in Hamilton, and simultaneously ran a story calling attention to fear-mongering over a proposed waste reduction project.  The waste reduction project involves using high heat to reduce the volume of municipal waste, but burning is not the mechanism.  The technology was developed in a pilot plant in Britain, and Hamilton would be the "guinea pig" for the first full-scale implementation of this method.  A whole series of forgetting of the justifications that ran earlier is necessary to propose all these contradictory arguments.

Hamilton Spectator sports columnist Bob Hanley wrote an immortal line about heavyweight boxer Leon Spinks.  Hanley said that Spinks had "the attention span of a retarded gnat.”  Something like that attention-deficit disorder seems to afflict city hall and some other prominent Hamilton institutions and personalities these days.

The front page of today’s Spectator carried a story headlined “Is Hamilton a gasification guinea pig?”  The editorial page bore the concern that Hamilton was going to lose out on the LRT if we couldn't so much as keep a bus lane experiment going.  It seems there is a lot of forgetfulness going on in Hamilton these days.

First, the LRT.  Not long ago, infuriating traffic calming measures were introduced on King Street, west of Wellington.  A beautiful arch was placed over the entrance-way to the downtown core.  As a sop to drivers who had used King to reach points west, Cannon Street was made into the express route to points west.  Traffic along King would be slowed so that more shopping might occur along King, since the drivers had lots of time to peer distractedly out their windows at the shops along King as they awaited their turn to inch forward.

Now, two of the four lanes of the express route that was Cannon Street are blocked off, reducing the traffic capacity by half.  One lane was converted to bicycle traffic, and the other to parking.  No study has been produced to show that business along King Street has improved.

If an LRT becomes reality, those traffic calming measures along King Street will have to be ripped out, and so will the arch over King Street at Wellington.  King Street narrows to two lanes at the arch, and at least one of those lanes will have to be used by the LRT.  Since the one remaining lane is not sufficient for automobile traffic to enter the downtown along King, the arch and the other calming measures will have to go, and King Street will have to be re-widened.

Recall that the LRT is being sold - not as a solution of the need to move large numbers of people - but as an economic stimulus that is environmentally friendly.  Business is supposed to pop up along the route like so many weeds, at least according to its supporters.  Given how obviously speculative this theory of stimulus is, one can rightly say that Hamilton is going to be a guinea pig for theory that LRT = business stimulus.

Hamilton’s being a guinea pig is a bad thing is the basis for the concern over the waste gasification proposal.  The usual environmentalist suspects in Hamilton are opposed in their usual way, demanding delays through more studies and creating a stench of worrisome uncertainty.  One would think the prospect of reducing the need for, and extending the life of, municipal dump sites would be a good thing to an environmentalist; but in Hamilton environmentalism = Ludditism.

Jack McDonald once wrote a great column for the Spectator in which he described the best principles of traffic engineering and how they were used to create one-way streets in Hamilton in the 1950s.  All the traffic engineering done in downtown Hamilton, from traffic calming to over-regulation and to reconversion to two-way have run against the principles that Jack McDonald described.  The Red Hill Expressway, conceived in 1963, was completed after a twenty year delay in the teeth of environmentalist opposition.

If important institutions in Hamilton had attention spans longer than that of a retarded gnat we would dump the LRT and opt for a rapid implementation of waste gasification.

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