The City Is Hoopless: THE VOTER
More on the city cracking down on street-side basketball hoops.
The base of the basketball net is more than likely on the city right-of-way at the front of the property. Too bad the basketball lobby wasn’t out in force when the city was looking at allowing gardening and little free libraries on the right-of-way in the last year or so.
Maybe they can get an amendment to whatever bylaw that would permit overhanging nets. The first thing you are supposed to look at when drafting legislation is what harm the new law is supposed to prevent or curtail. The only thing that could be an issue with that net is large trucks arriving to park in that spot along the road and hitting the net or the post.
My suspicion is that the overhang is just the means bylaw is using and the end is really stopping kids from playing on the street and having fun. This is Ottawa after all.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
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Hey The Voter: what next? Lemon aid stands, street hockey and now basketball. What’s next ticketing people for stepping on cracks on the sidewalks ?
“The first thing you are supposed to look at when drafting legislation is what harm the new law is supposed to prevent or curtail.” And therein the problem lies. Far too often, those who report to work at city hall, both staff and councillors, want to invoke a ‘solution’ to a problem that doesn’t actually exist. Or if it does exist, it is so insignificant as to be irrelevant.
I can’t call these efforts ‘half baked solutions’, because half baked implies that all the ingredients are there, it just requires more time in the oven. So many of the ‘solutions’ proposed by city hall are missing so many of the ingredients that they will never work properly. After a suitable passage of time, we hear rhetoric from the council sponsor about unintended consequences. Unintended the consequences may be, but for the most part that is the result of inadequate thought about the full range of possible outcomes.