Quote:
Originally Posted by OhioGuy
But this type of realignment had a negative impact for certain people as well. Rob Ford would never had been voted into office by the pre-amalgamation Toronto populace. Instead he won on the strength of suburbanites, many of whom have very different priorities than urbanites. Rob Ford claimed there was a war on cars and tried to re-prioritize automobiles to a more prominent position, which isn't surprising given the competing priorities of the GTA and from where the majority of his support originated (urban vs suburban). What's to say voting interests outside of Vancouver won't overwhelm the priorities of the city's current residents and move the Broadway extension down the list of priorities if a similar amalgamation were to occur there?
|
We all like to point at Rob Ford and go "look at that fat crackhead" now, but that doesn't make him wrong. What was wrong about GTA is that every election would scrap the previous guy's transportation plan, resulting in a lot more waste. Was TransitCity a good idea? I'm gonna say no. Was extending the Subway the best idea? Yes, but the way Toronto does it, is insane.
Think about this for a minute. Had Toronto bought two TBM's, put one at one end of the main subway line, eg Vaughan, and put the other one at where they are replacing the RT, and just said "we will just continuously extend the subway for the next 100 years or until the TBM's can no longer operate, regardless of who is elected" as as long-tail solution to keeping inner-city density real estate from doing what it does in Vancouver. Then "new area" would constantly be connected by a subway, and development pressure would stay down. There would be no pressure to build the tracks or stations until the city area it runs under decides they want it.
That would be long term planning. It's probably unrealistic, but it wouldn't result in the constant flipflop of scrapping and restarting opposing light rail and subway plans. They could still build light rail on top, but it would not be "an alternative" to the rapid transit backbone.
In a Vancouver context, it doesn't make as much sense to tunnel south of the fraser because the areas have a lot of of flood plains, and in 100 years parts of it will be under water (All of Richmond may end up under water too.) So any investment in surface/subsurface rail will eventually become useless.
Toronto will not be affected by sea level rise. Montreal will. But Metro Vancouver will be significantly impacted by it. Even a 2 meter rise renders parts of Richmond and Surrey significantly impacted by tides.
I have to agree with Jarett Walker (
human transit), in that we shouldn't be building something just because we can. We should be building something because it makes sense and increases mobility access. In fact if you watch any of
his talks on transit, you'd know he doesn't advocate for a specific technology.
Quote:
|
UBC students are smart and practical; they will use what works, bus or rail, and if you drastically reduce their mobility, they, and the University, will notice. That's why I've emphasized that any Broadway rail transit project has to be aggressive about travel times to UBC, because if you spend billions to build rail that's slower than buses, students will take the buses.
|
The context for that image is:
"If you want to be able to run extreme frequency, transit every 3 minutes, at 2 in the morning and you have a huge volume of people. Then you want driverless transit like Vancouver has"
"If you need to move a huge volume of people with one driver, then you need a train. Speed and Reliability are not about technology, they are about how long you stop and what can get in your way"
The problem is people like Patrick Condon who think we should impair mobility access to create sustainable communities by trapping people in them.
http://www.humantransit.org/2010/06/is-speed-obsolete-the-wrapup-.html
Quote:
Beyond this, the specific problem with streetcars comes when you move from a streetcar-as-urban-vision to a streetcar-as-transit-proposal, especially a streetcar-replacing-existing-bus-proposal. My original post, "streetcars: an inconvenient truth," was specifically about proposals to replace existing frequent bus routes with streetcars. Condon's work caught my eye because he actually makes this proposal. He wants to replace many of Vancouver's frequent buses with streetcars, and he explicitly invokes the Portland Streetcar as his inspiration.
As I explained here, this particular kind of proposal -- to replace a bus in mixed traffic with a streetcar in mixed traffic -- is unique in the world of transit corridor improvements in this respect: once you've spent all those millions, nobody can get anywhere any faster than they could before. In other words, if you draw a map of where you can get to from your house in a fixed amount of time, spending these millions doesn't change that map at all.
And when you've got so many people without any kind of useful service, and so many voters who aren't interested in urban visions but are interested in getting to work on time and then home to their loved ones, well, to some people, this is going to seem like an odd thing to spend millions of transportation dollars on.
|
And... that is why people vote No on transit referendums.
Prev
What you defined was much what I had in mind, also
Linear Mode
