Quote:
Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper
I totally understand why traffic is worse. The city has grown but not its infrastructure. Taxing congestion will certainly reduce traffic. The haves will begrudging pay while the have nots won't be able to afford it.
I can appreciate the autocentric lifestyle hoping in a car and driving 5 to ten minutes to work, shop and play after dating someone in Mississauga and spending years sitting in traffic on a streetcar making the York Street loop or a packed subway for an hour (definitely not an hour anymore) to go 8 kilometres. Mississauga is still not a lifestyle for me. Toronto was build in an era around the car and to say that Crosstown, the Ontario Line and GO-RER and a record number of bike lanes will change all that is too optimistic for me including the veritcal suburbs planned around Crosstown and the GO-RER being intracity than providing improved local transit. Regardless, It's just a start to bring overall transit from the 1980s into the 2000s . None of this is going to give specifically families living in autocentric communities a viable alternative to driving. Neither is stacking 50 storey towers side by side with million of square feet of residential space with ten thousand square feet in ground floor retail
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
When it comes to urban mobility, we aren't in an era of sea changes anymore.
The automobile period (in Toronto) between 1945-1975 just had everything line up for it. The region nearly tripled in population and there were no acknowledged costs to sprawl (energy, materials/labour, regulatory, environmental expropriation of property, etc.).
Instead of one hegemonic transportation form dominating over every trip for every person like the car did, the future will be a buffet of mobility options that have their own advantages and disadvantages for specific circumstances.
Beyond better transit, I see a lot of things chipping away at car use: working from home, the fact that net job growth is only really occurring downtown and that office parks are dying a slow death, online shopping, the cost of gas, the appeal of e-bikes and micromobility, Uber (may not reduce congestion, but may reduce private car ownership and therefore induced car trips), etc.
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I only support congestion pricing in settings where there's a strong transit system as an alternative to driving, but the city already has an upper-mid tier transit system that gets high ridership in the context of North America. The current rail network system is less developed than it should be, but the world class bus system partially offsets that. Once those other projects are in place I do think transit will be a reasonable alternative to driving downtown. That won't necessarily have much effect on the car dominance of outer areas, but no single solution should be expected to solve all problems.
I think it's also important to note that congestion pricing tends to be limited to central cities, and downtown and inner Toronto were built before the prevalence of car culture so they're already ideal for transit. The majority of people working downtown already use transit to get there including many outer suburbanites who use GO so I don't think increasing that rate even counts as a sea change. It would simply be another step, albeit a significant one, in an ongoing progression.
Personally I'm skeptical of claims that congestion pricing in major transit-rich cities is harmful to low income "have-not" people. Driving and parking downtown is already the most expensive option that such people largely can't afford as is. Meanwhile, the funds collected from the congestion charge can be used toward further improving transit which will disproportionate benefit poorer people who will be using the transit and therefore not paying the tolls. So in essence, it's a wealth transfer from the top toward the bottom thus actually
decreasing inequality. This is important because everyone who drives downtown (at least in peak periods) is already tolled by congestion in terms of the time, stress, and lost productivity along with the external penalties like noise and pollution experienced by everyone including those who aren't even driving. The congestion pricing simply places the full burden on those most willing and able to pay it while funneling that value into productive uses rather than it just being destroyed as is the case with stress and lost time / productivity.
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