I am not an environmentalist except in that I value the air we breathe and tire of seeing ugly housing developments increasingly taking over valuable green spaces. I don't really fancy myself any sort of "ist". I like to be open to new ideas, and I think the notion of pushing ever outwards has been tried and does not work particularly well if our goals are something other than gridlock and environmental degradation.

I think we do need high speed trains, but there is certainly room for much greater population intensification in Toronto prior to having suburbs explode all over the place. At its highest density Toronto (which often fancies itself the Manhattan of the North) is about 13000 people per square kilometer. This is about half that of Manhattan. (I am just using approximate figures as there are disputes about the numbers in different sources). Rather than building out, we probably need to build up.