This council cannot resist the atavistic urge to put identity politics ahead of strategic planning. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/sobi-1.5587866 #HamOnt #facepalm #welcometounstoppable

Amazingly, the suburban councillors voted to overrule the wards 1-3 councillors spending money *from their own dedicated ward capital reserves* to keep the program running. This is a gross double standard and the kind of anti-urban hypocrisy that has become far too common here.

The most vocal anti-amalgamation sentiment has been from angry suburban residents who didn't want to get bolted onto Hamilton (but were happy to have Hamilton subsidize their infrastructure through regional government, of course).

But amalgamation - which was imposed on all of us by the Conservative Harris government - has left the old city subject to the one-way whims and caprices of anti-urban resentment and grievance, which suburban councillors openly embody and shamelessly encourage.

Strategic plans don't matter. Strategy only makes sense if we're all trying to build on our common values and interests, and the identity politics of resentment are antithetical to common values.

Likewise, the facts don't matter. This decision isn't about making the most cost-effective use of scarce resources, it's about driving a wedge into the body politic and pandering for rhetorical points against the 'other', no matter the actual cost.

Nor is consistency a factor. The councillors complaining that bike share doesn't serve their wards are the same councillors who only agreed to allow it in the first place as long as it *didn't* go in their wards.

How do you reason with bad faith? How do you negotiate with bad faith? How do you build on a foundation of cynicism and grievance? After close to two decades of caring about what happens in this city, I am no closer to a workable answer now than I was in 2003.

Facts and arguments need to take root in a worldview to influence our decisions. The angry, anti-urban worldview that drives #HamOnt identity politics is stony ground indeed. It is the place where so many transformative ideas go to die.

Anti-urban resentment is a failing strategy for #hamont, but it works well for the cynical politicians who stoke it. Keeping their constituents misinformed and bitter keeps them employed even as it harms the city as a whole - including their constituents, who deserve better.

On the rare occasion where an inclusive urban project actually goes ahead and is successful, that just makes the aggrieved anti-urban haters even more bitter and resentful. It certainly doesn't inspire them to reconsider their opposition to it.

For example, how many lower-city one-way dead zones do we need to convert into vibrant two-way people places before the haters finally acknowledge that city streets work better when they are more inclusive?

At least one more, as always, Miss Swann.

How many new protected two-way cycle tracks have to fill up with cyclists before we are willing to acknowledge that there is a huge latent demand for safe cycling infrastructure?

Bike Share was widely (by the haters) expected to be a total failure. Instead, pound for pound it has been one of the most successful systems in North America: built and operated on a shoestring budget, it achieved 26,000 active members and 350,000 trips a year.

Far from mollifying the critics, its success just made them hate it even more. How do you reason with that? How do you negotiate with that? I wish I knew.

This city is broken. I have no idea how we can fix it. But until we do, every new project faces a hurricane of resistance, every existing project lives in existential jeopardy and each tiny step we take upward is on a slurry of unstable land that is itself sliding down.

/Thread.

PS. I edited this into an article for @raisethehammer https://raisethehammer.org/article/3759/bike_share_a_victim_of_anti-urban_identity_politics