The answer to urban traffic congestion? Cars

[MichaelS]

Why are LRT systems not as affective in the USA as they are in Canada?

[Boris2k7]

Well, I can certainly think of several reasons but I'm not sure as to which plays the most dominant role

• Cultural Bias
• Relative lack of transit funding (this has changed over time, but is still strongly biased towards regional projects like commuter rail)
• Relative inability to coordinate transit-supportive land uses
• Lower gas prices
• Very high amounts of highway funding/expansion
• NIMBYism
• Presence of many decentralized postwar cities and exurbs, especially in the sunbelt
• Decline of central cities over decades and loss of jobs along with them

[someone123]

There are many reasons. The most concrete are that US cities tend to be less densely built up than Canadian ones. There is also a lot more investment in transportation infrastructure in the US than in Canada, with more coming from the federal level. This means that more highways get built and that more marginal or speculative LRT systems get the green light.

Cities like Tacoma and Buffalo in the US operate LRT systems. There are about half a dozen cities in Canada (Victoria, Winnipeg, London, Kitchener, Quebec City, Halifax) that could produce much higher ridership levels if given a similar amount of funding to build light rail lines.

[vid]

I think the amount of people that use Buffalo's LRT is equal to the amount of people that use Thunder Bay Transit.

That is, < 10,000 a day.

[ReginaGuy]

Article brought to you by Encana!
.. joking aside, I seriously wonder if this guy has an ulterior motive.. Take a look at his most recent columns..


- "The answer to urban traffic congestion? Cars"

- "Road to hell is paved with public transit"

- "Big Oil firms aren't the bandits here"

- "Why fume? Gasoline remains a bargain"

- "The big myth about Big Oil"

- "Cut your carbon footprint … take the car"

- "Climate policy frenzy leads nowhere"

seriously! And it just keeps going on like that!

And look at this quote from "Cut your carbon footprint … take the car":

British environmentalist Chris Goodall asserted last year, in his provocative book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, that driving your car to the supermarket could be better for the environment than walking there. It all depended, he said, on the food you use to supply the energy for the stroll. He cited a 1.5-mile (2.4-kilometre) jaunt as an example.

WOW, that's one of the dumbest arguments I've ever heard.. Who actually needs to eat an extra meal just to walk 2.4 km? Most likely, people eat the same amount in a day where they walk 1km as they do on a day when they walk 10km, so his point is moot

[vid]

I like that logic.

"As long as you don't eat food, you can drive as much as you want."

And I thought retards were retarded!

[someone123]

The original argument was that if you were to live on a diet of pure beef, driving would be more efficient than walking in terms of greenhouse gas emissions produced.

I can accept that beef requires a lot of energy and results in lots of byproducts but there are foods other than beef (I managed to go for a walk a few minutes ago without eating a hamburger beforehand) and in fact people quickly die if they eat only meat. Furthermore, if I remember correctly the effects of the entire processing and consumption of the beef were taken into account but were compared only to the final emissions from burning the gas. What about the costs of refinement and production/maintenance of the car?

An apples-to-apples comparison using a real diet would yield very different results.

[ToxiK]

So he says that the food energy needed to move a walking human can be superior to the oil energy needed to move a car that is 10 or 20 times heavier? Or more precisely that the pollution related to the food energy is higher than the pollution related to oil. Does that even make sense?

[Mille Sabords]

Not only is Randal O'Tool an ideologue (and a demagogue too), he also seems to be politically savvy. His attack on transit in a national newspaper (at least, so the Globe says it is) skilfully combines his reheated arguments with drippingly contemptuous attacks on the city of Ottawa, which elsewhere in Canada is weekend journalism candy, I'm sure. (Shame on Ottawa for having the second highest per-capita readership of this newspaper after Toronto).

"the urban-chic Byward Market – 18-wheeler transport trucks and gargantuan double-length “articulated” public transit buses clog Ottawa's main drag"

We only have one main drag, of course. And it sounds pretty ugly. Plus, we dare to have an urban-chic neighbourhood. Only one, rest assured, dear Canadian taxpayer.

Ottawa has produced a master plan, however, to rid its grimy downtown streets of buses and their fumes. As part of a $4-billion, 20-year public transit program, Ottawa is set to buy a light-rail commuter service with routes ambitiously running in all directions – north and south, east and west. For $550-million, Ottawa will replace its downtown bus stops with an underground light-rail subway service. Outside the core, however, Ottawa's articulated buses will nevertheless retain the elite status to which they have grown accustomed. They will gain another 60 kilometres of “transitway” – highway lanes reserved for the exclusive use of such uberbuses.

All directions? Gee, don't all cities have a north and a south, an east and a west? That's all four of'em, yup. And our lines are running AMBITIOUSLY in all four of those directions! Wow! So many cities have lines that only run lackadaisically in all directions!

The elite status? really? aside from the Transitway, can anyone honestly look me in the face and tell me 30- to 60-minute frequency is elite status? Can anyone tell me that anything less than all-day 5-minute frequency is actually Elite?

[INDENT]Think of it. For roughly the cost that Panama will incur to double the capacity of the Panama Canal ($5-billion U.S.), Ottawa will build itself a fashionable public transit system that will probably waste more energy and will likely discharge more greenhouses gases – though perhaps not directly up the noses of the parliamentarians.

There's Big Bad Ottawa, Fat Cat City, spending as much as the Panama Canal!! The nerve of these people! These bureaucrats are out of control!

I could go on, but I'm too bored by now.

[Jared]

Ah yes, the "driving is more environmentally friendly than walking" article. Reading that was like being punched in the face with a fistful of stupid.

lets review:

- Deliberately chooses beef, because beef is one of the most environmentally unfriendly foods
- However, it assumes an "average" car
- Assumes person driving the car would not eat the beef anyways. Given the obesity levels in North America, people arent eating just for the sake of survival
- Does not take into account the entire lifecycle of the car
- Ignores the possiblilty of walking to a closer store, depending on availability

if we want to get really picky, we can add things like the money NOT spent on driving if you walk can be used for carbon offsets etc., but its unlikely anyone would actually do this.

[ReginaGuy]

Not to mention he forgot to account for all of the energy required to refine the gasoline, which is probably tripple the amount require to produce the food

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by MichaelS

Why are LRT systems not as affective in the USA as they are in Canada?

Some of the reasons have already been listed. But I think the biggest reason is decline of downtowns as the main focus of employment and activities in the metropolitan regions.

They are building these LRT's, yet at the same time very very very very small amounts of Americans in these cities even need to venture into the central city. So the LRT lines get low ridership.
Of course there are other factors like lower densities, etc.

[Tony]

So if the lastname "Smith" is derived from "Blacksmith"... what's "O'Toole" from?

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by MichaelS

Why are LRT systems not as affective in the USA as they are in Canada?

People just don't show the love (affective)

[wild wild west]

Also, while Ottawa's streets might seem "grimy" compared to the tiny town in Oregon Mr. O'Toole lives in, I would say that they are relatively clean for a burg of 1.2-1.3 million.

[Mille Sabords]

Originally Posted by wild wild west

Also, while Ottawa's streets might seem "grimy" compared to the tiny town in Oregon Mr. O'Toole lives in, I would say that they are relatively clean for a burg of 1.2-1.3 million.

As clean as they can be if you look past the trucking and the drug alleys. Which do exist, to be fair, and are a scar on the city, but are confined to specific areas as in Vancouver.

I'd be curious to find out how much Mr O'Toole makes a year and who pays for his writings and his "research". If anyone has seen the movie "Thank you for smoking", this guy reminds me exactly of what the movie describes.

[AuxTown]

Originally Posted by Mille Sabords

As clean as they can be if you look past the trucking and the drug alleys. Which do exist, to be fair, and are a scar on the city, but are confined to specific areas as in Vancouver.

I'd be curious to find out how much Mr O'Toole makes a year and who pays for his writings and his "research". If anyone has seen the movie "Thank you for smoking", this guy reminds me exactly of what the movie describes.

LOL, I just watched that movie last week and you're exactly right! I don't trust too much in the media, especially when the articles don't agree with my personal opinion .

[wild wild west]

Originally Posted by Mille Sabords

As clean as they can be if you look past the trucking and the drug alleys. Which do exist, to be fair, and are a scar on the city, but are confined to specific areas as in Vancouver.

I'd be curious to find out how much Mr O'Toole makes a year and who pays for his writings and his "research". If anyone has seen the movie "Thank you for smoking", this guy reminds me exactly of what the movie describes.

Overall I still find Ottawa to be an exceptionally clean city for its size and age. O'Toole makes it sound like Detroit.

[HomeInMyShoes]

The real answer to traffic congestion is to line up all the people like this and ...

I've lived within three blocks of a grocery store for the last ten years until my last move. The reason the supermarket is 1.5 miles away is you are living in car-centric suburbia.

[craner]

because family size alone typically determines the number of people in any particular car at any particular time. (He calculates average car occupancy this way: family size minus one.)

This seems a rather high occupancy calculation as most vehicles I observe have a single occupant.