Quote:
Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker
It isn't counter intuitive when you're thinking about building transit in a world where you have limited resources. You want to take the most people out of cars for the longest distance possible
Without redevcelopment, Centre St south of Beddington can be supported by the bus network for a long time, and it is already rather competitive with the auto in the zone given its reasonable modal share (if my memory is correct). With redevelopment you can count the marginal rider around the corridor the same as a marginal rider way out in the suburbs.
Transit planning isn't about making people happy, it is about doing the best we can with limited resources. Why should we spend billions more to run the train down Centre St to better serve the single family houses. Unless there is buy in to the development of high density nodes at stations surrounded by medium and low rise higher density further out - what is the point?
Now I think the LRT should go down Centre St, and that the Nose Creek option is really stupid. But building it to serve what is there right now? Talk about white elephant that will destroy the political support for new transit for years.
Going back to your 'reason the BRT was added', it is true. But if no communities were north of Beddington Trail, the BRT would never have been run up and down Centre St. That Centre St was the best route for the north of Beddington BRT to reach downtown should not be taken as illustrative of future intentions.
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I basically also agree with this. Two things though:
I'm not sure that I can agree fully with transit planning isn't about making people happy. There is at least a little bit of balance here. Providing high frequency for example, is already a measure that could be considered as something making people happy when it isn't necessarily efficient resource use. Of course with much cheaper low frequency, you might never really get any signficant amount of ridership. Hence, a balance. Anyway, this may have been semantics.
Secondly, yes it would be necessary to upzone that corridor. However, when talking about taking the most amount of people off the road for the longest amount of time, it would be necessary to extrapolate this beyond commuter trips. While this may be the effect for commuter trips, what happens for all other trips? Those suburban areas, specifically those north of Beddington are not designed, zoned, or dense enough to encourage non vehicular trips for other non commuting activities. The Center St. corridor at least has this potential. I'm not familiar enough with the actual data, but would wager a guess that even currently this is the case as is reflected by the mention of the current modal share in that area. Furthermore, efficient transit service all the way out to the edge of the city would only encourage the edge of the city to expand quicker.
The C train as is, is a system that was built (albeit, likely without this realization at the time) as a sort of commuter system and sort of urban generator/service system at the same time. The latter not being as focused on as perhaps would have been/would be ideal. My point being, either build it up Center et al with upzoning and an understanding that it is a really long term investment, or don't build it at all.
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