| Agree++ >People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. If we can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is where the fight should be pointed I believe. This. So much. Affordable housing and reasonable transit that makes the entire city and neighboring suburbs accessible will reduce car usage. I work in Toronto and commute from a nearby suburb. Rent and real estate costs in the city are ridiculous, but I'm planning on making the move anyway. I would love to live car-free, but the reality is a failure of transit. Transit sucks: 1) Transit in suburbia sucks. A lot of routes are every 30 or 60 minutes. 2) Transit between the suburbs and the city sucks. The systems are not aligned well and when you have layers of busses and trains that only come every 30-60 minutes, it just adds a lot of unnecessary waiting time to your commute. This causes a lot of people to drive and park at the GO station so they can take a train into the city. 3) Transit in Toronto is great if you happen to live and work on a Subway line. If not, good luck - you'll likely add 20-60 minutes to your transit commute. A car makes the rest of the city easily accessible. So dealing with 2-3 different transit systems makes a commute unreasonable. If you're commuting from a nearby suburb, it can take 2+ hours to get to work. My partner works in another suburb, and to transit there would take about 2.5-3 hours each direction. It's just not practical. We've reached a compromise: We have a single car, and we car-pool to a reasonable spot and I take the train into the city. I'm lucky in that my place of work is near a subway stop, so my entire commute in this way is about 75-90 minutes each-way. I often work on the train on my way to work. I'm planning on moving to the city, but we will never be able to be car-free with the state of transit the way it is. My partner will have to drive from Toronto to her work. Without traffic, probably 25 minutes. With traffic, closer to an hour. But that beats the 2.5-3 hours (each way) that it would take to commute via transit. |
But the transit system seems to be built for a Toronto half the size. In between the hubs of density are miles of big box plazas, McMansions and 10 lane roads with neverending traffic jams. Downtown exploded while the subways and Gardiner choked. In the race to develop it seems no one was looking at the big picture of how all this growth was going to interact.
I've heard of the regional transport plan, The Big Move - curious to see how this affects the GTA in the next decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Move