Remember the St. Lawrence Seaway? It was a massive dig to allow ships to better bypass Montreal and its rapids by avoiding the Lachine Canal.
Man, was that ever a waste: it wrecked lives, killed towns and to this day was never economically justifiable.
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In a few decades we'll look back at our focus on our current transportation initiatives in the same light, as the billions we spend on the Turcot interchange rebuild and new metros to the east will seem like folly.
That's because there's far less reason to take leave home than there once was. Half of Canadian jobs are telework-compatible, according to Statscan, which reports that the 1.5 million that already work from home, a total that's exploding.
Auto manufacturers have also famously noticed that young people are no longer owning cars in quite the same numbers as they once did, (which explains why car ads show hipsters looking at his Facebook on their dashboard) and part of that is because they need cars less for work.
Instead of pouring big money into highway and transit improvements, Montreal should save oodles of cash by encouraging telework, something that Calgary has started in 2008 with its WORKshift program.
Not only would such a program save huge amounts of money in transportation infrastructure, it would allow workers to spend more time with their children, it would ease traffic, help the environment, save a ton of time and it would conceivably even allow employers to pay workers slightly less, as the worker no longer needs to spend as much time and money on travel, buying new clothing and so forth.
Man, was that ever a waste: it wrecked lives, killed towns and to this day was never economically justifiable.
That's because there's far less reason to take leave home than there once was. Half of Canadian jobs are telework-compatible, according to Statscan, which reports that the 1.5 million that already work from home, a total that's exploding.
Auto manufacturers have also famously noticed that young people are no longer owning cars in quite the same numbers as they once did, (which explains why car ads show hipsters looking at his Facebook on their dashboard) and part of that is because they need cars less for work.
Instead of pouring big money into highway and transit improvements, Montreal should save oodles of cash by encouraging telework, something that Calgary has started in 2008 with its WORKshift program.
Not only would such a program save huge amounts of money in transportation infrastructure, it would allow workers to spend more time with their children, it would ease traffic, help the environment, save a ton of time and it would conceivably even allow employers to pay workers slightly less, as the worker no longer needs to spend as much time and money on travel, buying new clothing and so forth.