Quote:
Originally Posted by newflyer
Yes.. people like Boris who base there aurguements solely on ideogy.. without anything to back it up.
Well Boris let me inform you that LRT's have not only reinforced the advancement of suburban sprawl, but has provided a completely false sence of minimizing the decentralizing of urban centres. The whole concept has been partially highjacked by a minority of misinformed individuals.
Yes Light rail does reduced the traffic on roadways, but it is a extremely expensive option, which isn't viable for many centres. In Winnipeg's case it would be nice, and I would love using it as a daily transit user myself, but Winnipeg's finances could not afford to subsitdize such a nonself-sufficient public mega project... which would also rapidly increase suburban sprawl. To even suggest it wouldn't would be little more than pure denile of the facts.
It is too bad some people are so blinded by pure emotion and even have to resort to insulting those who make well informed arguements. With that aside all the extreme retoric is really meaningless drivel.
Increasing transportation options to the suburbs only increases the attractiveness of those suburbs. There are many people who live in the inner city to maintain easy access to the innercity .... but by developing mass rapid transit, it makes the suburbs a much better option than without rapid transit.
Boris you like to see things in black and white... (rail is good .. roads are bad), but imagine for example if there was a rapid rail line connecting Stonewall to downtown Winnipeg. This would be a huge plus for Stonewall as a means to attract new residents, while vastly improving the commuting lives of the current residents already living there.
Yes I know what you are thinking .. but Stonewall is not part of the city, but in reality it would have the same impact to any suburb within the citylimits as well. The truth was revealed to me when the Sommerset station was established on the far south end of the city of Calgary (argued it would assist in reducing the traffic conjestion).. but bedroom communities (like Okotoks among others) further south became a much more inviting option to developers and people who were looking to commute from out of town. Those bedroom communties as well as the far south end of the city of Calgary exploded in response to the increased access to rapid transit, far beyond areas without the rapid transit option.
For the record .. I have close ties in Europe and am very aware the amount of commuters who travel into the major cities from out of town.. either by car or rail. Europe is not the omnipure society as you like to project it... It has traffic conjestion ... smog and the many other problems faced by North American cities. Perhaps you should see it before you make your vast assumptions.
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And you base this on what, your own rhetoric? It is already clearly established that you feel that truck traffic is the end-all and be-all to a local or regional economy, and that free market business comes first before all other concerns, even the environment (which is absurd of course, we can live without the trucks, we can't without all the valuable farmland, wetlands, clean air, clean water, etc.).
The reason that rail is better than roads, in terms of sprawl, is that the furthest people will drive in a rail-based system is to and from the nearest station. And that is limited by the number of parking stalls. You can concentrate development around train stations and make them pedestrian and transit hubs, something that always turns out disastrously when put beside expressways. In the end, the land use and transportation benefits are a net positive for the city. In the streetcar era, development was concentrated around these lines until car access became available in the 1950's and the big auto companies bought up and tore out the railways. The concept of transit-oriented villages (TOD) is what drives this movement today.
And your alternative, of building more roads, is much worse. Your entire premise is that LRT doesn't slow down sprawl (in your mind it actually helps it, which is completely bogus), and therefore roads do? Explain what kind of point you are trying to make, because so far it seems empty.
In terms of efficiency, a single line running into downtown Calgary, for example, carries well over 25,000 commuters in an
hour. That is comparable to Macleod Trail over the course of an entire
day (~27,000 vehicles) and about half of what Deerfoot does over an entire day (~36,000 vehicles), when you consider that most commuters are 1 person/vehicle. All you have to do to expand a transit system is add a line every 20-30 years and otherwise just upgrade the stations. It's entirely scalable. The only reason that the stations aren't coming along quickly is because the city and province are wasting money building something like 21 interchanges around the city. The political will is only just starting to come around for the West LRT, something which planners have been pushing for over 20 years and would greatly reduce vehicular traffic coming down Bow Trail and into the Beltline.
As far as Calgary's southern communities exploding because of rapid transit, that simply is not true. If anything, the Southwest lags behind the Southeast and the Northwest in development, both of which areas are seeing massive amounts of road construction. The LRT expansion in the northwest doesn't even count, since it doesn't go anywhere near the new areas. In the Southwest, the LRT runs right beside existing communities, and is patronized by them, while the development south of 22X has not taken off there. Suburban communities like the Everridge which are booming are doing so as a result of the Fish Creek Bridge which was completed in 2004.
You also can't prove that Winnipeg cannot afford to build any rapid transit. This is a city of what, 700K we are talking about? Smaller European centres can easily afford a basic tram system, and Winnipeg surely isn't the glorified mess you make it out to be. Is there any conclusive city-directed study out there on rapid transit in Winnipeg?
As for your last post, I'll respond to that here. The only way to add infrastructure into an existing area is to rip up what is already there, unless there were big ROWs in the first place (which is usually not the case). You don't need to do much to add another transit line, bulldozing extra lanes into a community (such as 16th Ave N. in Calgary) does horrendous damage to the urban fabric. If you were only thinking about changes in traffic lights and underpasses at rail crossings, I have few objections, except that pedestrian connections always come before road connections. If a road runs through an area where there is existing or potential pedestrian activity, traffic lights should be added, not taken out.
Winnipeg has too many surface lots, yes. So does Calgary. There is a reason for that restricted access and higher parking rates, it helps force people onto transit. Most major, thriving cores have restrictions on getting into downtown. In London and New York, for example, you have to pay tolls. In order to stop companies from fleeing downtown to the burbs, all you have to do is to not allow any permits unless the development conforms to the city's planning vision and includes considerations such as transit. Calgary can do this, and so can any other city with a similar Municipal Planning Act. I've already addressed the point about the infrastructure upgrades, and the only truth there is that if the city had committed to more transit expansion 10 or even 20 years ago, it wouldn't be as bad as it is now. It is because the city caters first to automobiles, the ultra-innefficient mode of transportation, that people have such a hard time getting anywhere.
Besides, most of our cities are FAR too easy to get around. Most of the road infrastructure isn't being used to capacity, and yet we keep building more an more to appease suburban voters. We've seen nothing but roads and roads and roads being built for the last 8 or 9 years, and the traffic increasingly gets worse. So much for improvements. What's the point of investing all those billions into expressways and freeways if there is no noticeable effect?
One final note that might come across more to your tune. I think that if you want to increase truck traffic through the city, you should be taking existing expressways and then making them limited-access, taking out either entire lanes just for trucks or the entire road. Then, put a
modest toll for those industries that use the road, directing that money into a rapid transit to for those commuters that were displaced. You would also need new regulations to keep heavy truck traffic off of other roads. Put a development levy on TODs around stations for this line, and direct it towards further improvements in transit, such as feeder connections. Meanwhile, the road toll will begin to pay for further upgrades to the truckway. In the end you have a win-win-win situation. The city gets more high intensity development (and a tax base-infrastructure spending ratio) and a better transit system, there's more opportunity for developers and the truckers get a dedicated roadway. The only problem is that people developed freeways in the past under the premise that it was for the industry, but it ended up being mostly for suburban commuters. Another problem is that initially people would react poorly to taking away a road for commuters.
Overall, any mentions of transportation NEED to mention the entire triple-bottom line (economic, environmental, social). Any failure in one of these areas is not acceptable. It is also inconcievable to speak of transportation without any relation to land use, since they are quite finely intertwined. Focusing on only the economy will not be good enough, especially not the free market, which does not and should not provide schools or hospitals for these automobile-oriented (sprawly) communities, cares little for the environment (and exploits it as much as possible) and often concentrates investment in a few communities at the expense of others. The result of which is that we have poor communities and rich communities, those with over-gentrification and those which have decayed.
Now just to sit and wait for the "left-wing rhetoric and propoganda" attack. T_T
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And current transportation plans do not include one. Just alot of road widenings.
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