Take the fork in the road

Vincent J. Curtis

24 June 23

RE: Hamilton urban planning faces fork in the ‘stroad’ Op-ed by Paul Shaker.  The Hamilton Spectator 24 June 23.

In his work Dialectics, Aristotle explains how to put an argument without impairing its persuasiveness.  Paul Shaker hasn’t read Aristotle, and a critical analysis of Shaker’s argument concerning “stroads” finds it tedious and unpersuasive.

Main Street in Hamilton is an arterial road.  This confuses Shaker.  That ‘Main Street’ is a proper name, while arterial road is a technical common noun, is the source of his confuses.  Hence he offers definitions of streets and of roads to explain his bafflement, and attempts, in so doing, to baffle the reader.  The old technical term in urban geography for Shaker’s “street” is a commercial ribbon.  King Street between Wellington Street and Caroline Street is a commercial ribbon; James Street from Barton Street to Young Street is another.  Shaker’s definitions of streets and roads arbitrarily reduces the multitudinous purposes of city streets into just two, and to explain a third, he invents “stroad.”

All of this tedious formalism is to distract the reader from the ideological straitjacket being fitted for the conception of proper purposes, and therefore proper structures, of city streets.  Shaker eventually contends that Hamilton’s streets and roads are all messed up, ought to be something else, and need to be revised according to his ideological framework.

It never occurs to an ideologue that the reason reality doesn’t conform to the ideology is that the ideology is wrong.

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