Good, producers of products should be responsible for the disassembly and recycling of materials they use in their products.

If I buy a toaster or a TV I should be able to bring it back to any store, or common pickup location (like a pinguin pickup or beer store) to be taken back and recycled fully.

Any plastic wrap/containers or any packaging at all for products I buy at a store like Walmart for example should also be taken back by Walmart or any other store that carry’s said products.

I was just wondering about this topic this morning.

My thought was peoples happiness seemed to have been higher during the lock downs as driving habits changed drastically, such as a great number of individuals not needing to commut to/from work. This decrease traffic and commute times for essential workers, and increased satisfaction of both commuters and now non-commuters.

“Extreme car dependence is affecting Americans’ quality of life, with a new study finding there is a tipping point at which more driving leads to deeper unhappiness. It found that while having a car is better than not for overall life satisfaction, having to drive for more than 50% of the time for out-of-home activities is linked to a decrease in life satisfaction.”

The car has artificially increased distances people need to travel, and has also had a impact on inducing urban sprawl. Cars require space to drive and at the same time require large parking spaces at destinations points. If all this infrastructure was instead used for trains, trams, and buses, things would be closer and cities would be denser.

It would also be interesting to know how increased commute times on all forms of transportation affect peoples happiness and satisfaction. For example increased crowding and increased commute times on public transportation such as trains and subways could also be draining and frustrating when performed on a daily basis.

Government of Canada hates unions.

When LCBO staff were on strike Doug Ford the Premier of Ontario instead of helping resolve the strike, instead released an app for where else customer’s could get booze.

https://www.ontario.ca/page/where-buy-alcoholic-beverages

Now with Canada Post the Canadian government stepped in basically took away the right to strike and the right to negotiations.

This reminds me of Minority Report. Arrested by the pre-crime unit.

Guilty without the crime actually being committed.

What bothers me the most about Bill 212, Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act its solely “car brained”.

As a example the 401 on an average weekday serves about 500,000 commuters. While the subway system in Toronto on a average weekday servers close to three times that. Could you imaging if all these transits riders instead commutted by car?

Average travel times have increase along the 401 by 30-40 seconds, while on the Toronto subway average travel times have increase on average by 15min. (These are average times, we know a car commute can increase by about 5~10 minutes while a subway ride can increase by a hour)

By this metric why does this bill not look at increasing reliability of transite? Cough Cough Ellington LRT, Cough Cough Finch West LRT. This is ultimately what bill 212 is distracting us from.

Transit by these metrics is more efficient in moving larger amounts of people, but it’s failing in moving them quickly due to mismanagement and lack of public funding.

Viable alternatives to car dependency is exactly what helps in Reducing Gridlock, and Saving You Time.

But instead of focusing on viable alternatives, bike lanes are to blame, not the mismanagement of the new transits projects across Ontario and Canada.

This is by design, a dumber population is easier to control by the few.

A educated population is beneficial to society as a whole.

The footpaths are not being widened, in some cases the foot paths are only two shoulder widths wide.

Doug Ford made a claim about actually wanting to shrink some footpaths along university to allow for more cars, whole also removing dedicated bike lanes.

Most people in Canada don’t see bike lanes as something that increases pedestrian safety as a whole. Which is a shame all around.

Vaping is almost as cool as coal rolling.

How else are we going to increase shareholder value

Most of Ontario’s roadway infrastructure is in a decline and has been for a while now. Think potholes, crumbling sidewalks, crumbling bridges, lack of roadway reworks for better traffic calming and pedestrian safety to reach “vision zero”.

Its amazing how much car centric infrastructure costs to build and maintain. Its also heavily subsidised, because if you had to pay the “actual cost” to use a roadway it would be unaffordable. Not to mention the indirect costs, such as environmental costs and public heath and wellbeing.

There is a visible difference in how well maintained the tolled 407 is compared to other 400 series highways in terms of proper on/off ramps, concrete roadways, quick response times to debris clearing.

It is a shame the remaining “profits” (after maintainace costs) do not go into other infrastructure projects in Ontario, like schools, hospitals, and parks, but instead a private purse.

“While people are stuck in gridlock across the GTA, the 407 sits half-empty"

Looks like tolls are actually beneficial to reducing congestion…

Tolls help with choosing other forms of transportation, and reduce gridlock. If individuals had to choose to pay a direct fee (as opposed to a indirect fee) people may choose to drive less and choose to support forms of public transits more. This would ease congestion and promote a need for better more frequent public transportation.

Cities should start implementing a “Congestion Charge” for their downtown cores. Every vehicle should have a transponder so once it enters a specific area in a city centre it gets pinged and tolled. Residents living inside these areas would probably be a exemption to promote more families choosing to live in cities as opposed to commuting in and out everyday.

Relevant video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPWY9Mka4Io

I think it really just came down to costs and city budgets. Cities always seem to cut public funding allocated for things like this when trying to balance their budgets.

That is why I find a few of the comments that were suggesting the city should hire the man a little counterintuitive. The first thing the city would cut would be the light show saying it’s to expensive and to extravagant, probably in the same year they hire him even.

Holiday drive thru light shows in the GTA pretty much sums up the car centric nature of Ontario.

http://www.todocanada.ca/drive-thru-holiday-light-displays-in-gta/amp/

They should just end the drive thrus at a Timmie’s, nothing is more Canadian.

Seems to align with keeping the general public as uneducated as possible.

The more uneducated a population as a whole the easier for a government to control.

This just in, people with money have more to spend.

Its going to be interesting when this starts happening in North American, and in some places it may have already started.

Drought, wild fires, extreme heat, rise in ocean levels. Places like NYC, California, Florida may start becoming harder to live in. Canada may get colder and more extreme in temperature swings.

Places closer to or alongside the equator may become more ideal to live. That wall between the US and Mexico border might get in the way.

But, but I though undocumented immigrants were lazy?! How can they both be lazy and take all the jobs?!

You seem to be thinking small scale, the concept is decentralised electrical generation nation wide.

Not centralised energy generation such as a single solar plant, a single wind turbine field, a single coal plant, a single nuclear plant.

To cluster bomb a single PV plant (in one attack) would be “easy”, just as easy as a single coal plant.

To carpet bomb a whole nation (in one attack) with PV panels on every home, building, school, sports centre, field, farm would be logistically challenging.

In agree there are always those few in a community that feel the need to fight everything, even it may be in their best interest and the best interest of the community as a whole.

Anecdotally, I used to live in a rural suburban neighbourhood, the type where homes have large yards between them. There was a proposal to finally put in sidewalks along the residential streets in front of the homes, by narrowing the street a little. This would allows children to walk safely to the new school built, and allow people in the neighbourhood to go on walks, or walk their dogs safely.

Anyways, the amount of push back from some residents saying it will ruin the character of the neighbourhood, or that it would remove vital street parking, or shrink their driveways.

The neighbourhood street was about 4.5 cars wide.

In the end the sidewalks got put in after someone (that did not live in the area), ran over a residents dog along the street.