Thursday, July 09, 2009

How the Toronto garbage strike will affect tourists

My credentials: I live in Toronto. I am not a city worker, I am not involved in city government. I am not personally inconvenienced by or otherwise personally involved in the strike. My livelihood is completely unrelated to tourism. While I understand intellectually that tourism is important to the economy, on a personal level I don't care either way whether people come to Toronto or not.

Considerations: I do not spend a lot of time downtown or in tourist areas. However, the areas where I do spend time are typical of the density of tourist areas. It seems to me that tourist areas would have greater motivation to stay clean than my corners of the city. I live in a highrise neighbourhood, and the garbage strike is more likely to affect house neighbourhoods. I'd think tourists would be spending more time in higher density neighbourhoods.

Observations:

The only sign I've seen of a garbage strike so far is that the sidewalk garbage bins seem a bit full. There's stuff sticking out of them. On occasion I've seen small piles of stuff in front of them, but that's rare. If I only saw one bin like this, I wouldn't think much of it beyond "Hmmm, that bin needs to be emptied." It would take seeing three or five bins like that to notice that something is wrong.

There's only one place where I've gotten a whiff of a smell - this parking lot that I shortcut through, behind a block of small businesses with the dumpsters out back. I can smell the dumpsters as I walk past. It isn't disgusting, but it's there. I've smelled similar in parking lots of suburban strip malls. If I didn't know there was a garbage strike, I'd notice the smell, but I wouldn't think there's anything egregiously wrong.

Privately-owned public space, such as malls and the subway, seem to be doing perfectly fine. Their garbage cans are being emptied regularly.

I haven't seen any sign of vermin - not even cute vermin like mice or raccoons.

I haven't been in any parks, so I can't speak to how they are affected.

Extrapolating from what I've observed, it seems to me that any well-run tourist attraction would be able to manage things in a way that the garbage strike doesn't affect the tourist experience. They might just have to walk past a few over-full bins on the sidewalk is all.

1 comment:

laura k said...

Same here.

I think the tourism spectre is another form of union/worker-bashing. Woe is us, look how those greedy workers are hurting our city.