Quote:
Originally Posted by bigguy1231
I'd love to see something like that as well, but we will never see that on King St. It's not wide enough to accomodate 4 lanes of traffic and 2 streetcar lines.
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I was referring to the green median, not the four lanes of traffic.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bigguy1231
The only people who are advocating such nonsense are social activists types like you who think that their view of the world is the only view that matters. If everyone thought like you, we would all be walking, biking or using public transit to get around. The fact of the matter is most people use their cars and want to use their cars.
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No, the
fact is that when you build infrastructure for pedestrians cyclists and transit users, you get more pedestrians, cyclists and transit users. When you only build infrastructure for cars almost exclusively, you get almost exclusively drivers.
This has been proven over and over again in every city that has invested in improving infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists and transit users.
In the past decade, for example, Portland has increased its rate of cycling from the usual (for North American cities) negligible level to some 15 percent of commuter trips, simply by building a safe, continuous network of bike lanes.
Some European cities (notably Copenhagen and Amsterdam) have committed more resources to cycling and have consequently increased their share of cycling trips to around 50%.
This tells me two things:
1. Most people today drive because we have designed our cities to require extensive driving, not because everyone wants to drive everywhere.
2. Many people would prefer to walk, cycle or take transit if only they had an opportunity to do so.
The current system narrowly and arbitrarily
restricts the choices of citizens in how they can travel around the city - so it is you, in fact, who thinks your "view of the world is the only view that matters".
Quote:
Originally Posted by bigguy1231
I am sure there are just as many examples that have been failures. Just a couple off the top of my head would be Buffalo's LRT that was on the verge of bankruptcy a couple of years ago and Detroit. Neither one of those cities can be said to have used LRT to revitalize their downtowns.
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Those two are actually the
only two failures, and it's easy to see why they are special cases:
1. Both cities tried to build rapid transit systems while they were in the midst of catastrophic population declines.
Buffalo, for example,
lost 44 percent of its population in just a couple of decades. Detroit has seen a
similarly devastating economic decline.
Nothing even remotely similar has happened in Hamilton. The population of the lower city never collapsed the way it did in many US cities, and the downtown economy is still moderately vibrant, with functioning neighbourhoods, downtown office workers and generally surviving streetfront retail. We're a long way from, say,
Flint, Michigan, which is in a similar economic boat to Detroit and Buffalo.
2. The Buffalo and Detroit systems are technically very different from the proposed Hamilton system.
Buffalo's line runs underground through the downtown, under a street that was closed to all vehicle traffic, rather than at-grade and integrated with the street. Similarly, Detroit's system runs above grade in a one-way loop around a downtown with very few remaining corporate offices.
Yet even so, the Buffalo and Detroit systems are still used by thousands of people a day, and property values are higher near the stations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bigguy1231
I was recently downtown on a weekday at about 1 pm at King and James. I was walking to an appointment at the CIBC building. There was maybe 20 people waiting to cross the street on all 4 corners.
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I work near King and James so I see the area on a daily basis. It's generally lively during business hours. Of course it's not as busy as it was in decades gone by - after all, part of the point of building LRT and creating a TOD zone is to increase the density and vitality of the area. But it's ingeniously self-fulfilling to conclude that we can't bring more people back downtown because there aren't more people downtown right now.
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