Quote:
Originally Posted by Truenorth00
1) Those cars usually aren't built in Canada anymore.
2) What's good for Ottawa residents and the broader Canadian economy are different things. I assume you don't think the same way (about business for Canadian manufacturers) when you hear about cities sole-sourcing transit vehicles to Canadian OEMs solely for patriotic reasons.
3) Families having two cars forces a spiral of car dependency that makes a lot of other things worse. Even if you don't give a shit about the environment (as per our past conversations), the sprawl and housing affordability crisis that comes with high car dependency is hardly a minor impact on the quality of life of residents.
4) There's no way to actually get people to give up a car without having a transit network that is designed for use beyond just peak (as you are advocating for here). Indeed, a big part of the reason these buses are "empty" now is because the service is so crappy and unreliable that it isn't an alternative to secondary vehicle ownership, let alone primary vehicle ownership. Heck, even our LRT ridership will be lower than it could be, because the feeder network sucks.
5) While buses getting stuck in traffic sucks, that has very little to do with providing a reasonable baseline level of off-peak service. Again, the TTC does this across a huge chunk of suburban sprawl (416 suburbs) that really wouldn't be all that different from most of Ottawa. And they often do it without bus lanes too. Prior to the LRT, this would have been expensive to do because the bus fleet was supplying a lot of the long haul pax-kms. Now? Not so much. Route lengths after Stage 2 should be lower everywhere but in Kanata, Stittsville and Barrhaven. So it most certainly wouldn't cost a lot to provide 15 mins all day and 10 min peak service on most routes.
To anybody who thinks what we're doing right now is sustainable, I simply say look at the GTA and the 24/7 traffic mess that it is. Now just imagine what Ottawa will be like in 2040 at current growth rates but non-work transit modal share lower than Toronto.
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5 of the top 10 selling vehicles in Canada are still built here (Sierra, Silverado, RAV4, CRV, Civic).
Middle class people in Ottawa are not willing to take the bus for errands, whether it comes every 10 minutes or not. We lived in an infill townhouse project in the east end. Walking distance to the transitway and several local bus routes of varying frequency, and all sorts of stores within a 15 minute walk. Ours was practically the only house in the neighborhood with only one car. People who worked downtown took the bus to commute, besides that everyone drove everywhere. I generally agree with you on the need to change that culture, but buses are not the tool to do it.
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