Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need A Thneed
Exactly. If I was in a scenario like yours, walking would definitely be preferable.
We should provide good quality transit so as many people as possible can get around by using solely transit. But I have long argued, and some of the pro-transit people have failed to recognize, that there is a significant percentage of the workforce for which living close to their work is simply is an impossibility, due to their work - even with one company - moving around from place to place (daily, monthly, yearly), or their being no houses close to the industrial park they work at, or their work being mostly rural. Add on top of that people who need a vehicle of some kind to do their job. Depending on exactly how you define categories, I think you could get up to a number approaching 50% - people that essentially "need" a vehicle to get to work.
For our company, workers have to have a vehicle to get to work, and generally we won't even look at candidates that don't have one. Many of our projects have been inside the city, but a significant distance from any transit. Having employees without cars means that someone who has a car needs to pick up that person, which, at the best of times, is a hassle. We just finished a project where employees were working at the same place for 14 months straight, which is certainly on the long side, for us. But further to the uselessness of trying to locate closer to work, before that (2011), we had two projects going, one in Sparwood, BC, and the other south of Brooks. You hire a few guys locally, but the core guys worked all week, and then came home to their wives and families for the weekend. We've done projects right in the heart of downtown, and we've done projects just across the border into BC, projects 2+ hours SE of Calgary, and projects in Grand Prairie, Spirit River, and even up by High Level. Just after high school, I worked a fall driving from NE Calgary to the Bar U Ranch every day, in the days before the 2A was twinned, and Deerfoot was extended.
Like I said, for where I am right now (mostly in the office), I intend to try cycling to work once the ring road opens, but for right now, and often (especially for our site employees), there is no other option but to have a car.
Make the transit system good, and the likelihood of someone being able to rely on transit solely goes up. Good crosstown transit (BRT or LRT) into Foothills industrial would increase the options for tens of thousands of people. A SE-NC LRT plus many good BRT routes would increase substantially the percentage of people for which transit would be the best option, and substantially increase the percentage of people for which transit would at least be a decent option, and would improve the mobility for those who for which there is no other option than transit.
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I'm going to disagree that living a long way from your workplace means you absolutely need a car; there are tens of thousands of people who commute 30+ km from Connecticut and New Jersey and Long Island into Manhattan by transit every day. It's true that today if you live in Bragg Creek and work in Calgary, for instance, that you need a car to get to work, but that's just a result of no transit service being provided, not something inherent in the nature of that distance. If a competitive service is provided, then the distance is no barrier (transit actually performs better over longer distances).
In the
2006 Census, 12.6% of Calgary's workers worked with "no fixed workplace address". Or to come at it another way, looking at the
occupations of workers, in the Calgary Health Region (which includes the largest rural area that could still be considered Calgary-influenced, out past Banff, Vulcan to Drumheller) 14.8% of the workers are in the
trades or transportation jobs (e.g. construction workers, taxi or truck drivers). Another 3.0% are in
primary industry occupations, like farming, oil drilling or forestry. So that's about 18% of the workforce. 50% is clearly too high an estimate for people who actually need their car for work; the true number is probably higher than the 12.6% or 18% figures, but something closer to 20-30% is probably the right ballpark.
So let's say 25% of the workforce. But work trips aren't the only thing we should be able to take transit for. Workers make more trips in a week to other places than work (shopping, leisure, social, etc.) than they do commuting. And then there's the half of the population who doesn't work at all (children, students, seniors, homemakers). When you add it up, work is closer to 20% of all trips. And we're worried about the 25% of people who need their cars at work; that's only 5% of all trips. I think the most ardent transitheads on here would be totally fine if everybody who needed a car for work drove to work, and the other 95% of trips were made by transit, walking or cycling. We barely have 5% of trips made by transit.
I support better service to industrial areas (especially the 52nd St BRT), but the fact is that industrial areas, with the density we have them, are very difficult to provide truly high quality transit service to. The SE industrial area is 30 square kilometres, with around 60K jobs. The downtown is under 2 square kilometres, with twice as many jobs.
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