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Statement by Charles Hostovsky

Letter to the Editor: April 19, 2017

Dear Mr. Dreschel

Re: Majority of polled residents oppose LRT

As a professor and research associate in urban and transportation planning at the University of Toronto and the Catholic University of America in Washington DC; as a holder of a certificate in Post-Doctoral Research from McMaster in Transportation Planning and Traffic Engineering; as a Registered Professional Planner; and last but not least as a resident of Hamilton living here with my wife and children, I was surprised by the polling results you highlighted in your well written article. I obtained a copy of the Forum Research report and am writing in response to suggest that these polling results are unreliable and should be ignored, for the following reasons:

Interactive Voice Response, or robo-calls, is an unreliable means of polling and the subject of much controversy among social scientists. They are cheap and fast, used extensively in political polling. Recent election results in Canada and the USA have “Trump-ed” polls that have used this method.

Opinion polls should not be initiated by those with a vested economic or political outcome in the end result so as not to introduce bias and manipulate the results, which is often the case in political polling. Clearly all but one of the councilors who initiated this poll are anti-LRT and I find it interesting that the project manager from Forum did not want to be interviewed. Hmmmm. As Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is credited as saying, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

The robo-calls received responses from about 66% of Hamiltonians 55 and older. But only 29% of Hamiltonians are 55 and older according to the 2011 census. According to the largest on-board transportation poll ever conducted in the USA, 59% percent of all mas transit trips in the USA are taken by those between 24 and 54 years of age, who represent only 43% of the population (APTA 2007). I suggest that the research indicates that adults 55 plus prefer to drive, hence over sampling this age group can skew the results. Effective polling should be based on stratified sampling that uses random probability covering the entire target population. I am not sure weighting the results, as Forum Research did, gives reliable, unbiased results.

Research is clear that “millennials” (young adults) are preferring to live in city cores, rather than the suburbs, and are shying away from car ownership, preferring to use mass transit. If we ant to build a city for old people, then sure, lets forget about bike lanes and LRT and BRT for that matter, and keep our one way streets and antiquated, high carbon bus system. The poll should have paid special attention to millennials, who are inheriting our fine city.

I believe Hamilton has been subjected to significantly more negative publicity and politicing than other cities implementing LRT, which may have affected the perception of LRT, contributing to the poll results. Remember, the late and troubled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was elected on a platform of “ending the war on the automobile”. Fortunately he was not successful in killing the T.O. projects.

The Forum Research poll contained only three questions, incredibly short. Effective polls should contain multiple questions that cross check each other for reliability. To be meaningful I would have designed to poll to compare Hamiltonians who have used LRT in other cities with those residents who have not… I have travelled on LRT in the USA, Europe and Asia. The councilors are free to ask me what I think.

Lastly I would ask my fellow Spectator readers to google “Portland Oregon MAX light rail” and find out how sustainably a city with the same size population as Hamilton can be with their almost 100 kilometres of 5 north-south and east-west lines of LRT. I have been there twice for a week each, and had no need to rent a car or take a shuttle or taxi, even from the airport. Do we want Hamilton to be a sustainable city with the state of the art in bicycle/pedestrian and mass transit infrastructure? Or do we want to keep our “steel city” heritage with one way, high traffic speed streets that spew CO2 and antiquated high carbon and less efficient bus system? So lets build the LRT and please extend it to Eastgate Square ASAP, a real destination over that east end traffic loop.

Prof. Charles Hostovsky, PhD, RPP
Stoney Creek
chuck.hostovsky@utoronto.ca

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