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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
I actually would agree with that. I think the situation is somewhat analogous to the downtown relief line issue in Toronto in that the infrastructure would be physically in the central areas but it would make it more convenient for people coming into town from outer areas.
While it's important to provide good transit service to people in central areas, people in inner nabes already create less car traffic since they walk and bike more which makes sense since it's geographically pretty small. Most of the traffic volume is from commuters coming in from outside, while much of the congestion is from either the choke points coming onto the peninsula or from the confined street layout. Having a way for people to come in and out of town fast bypassing congestion and frequent stops would attract a lot of riders and reduce surface street traffic volumes significantly.
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I look at those traffic bottlenecks as both a symptom and a motivation.
The traffic buildup is a symptom that there are a lot of people driving into the downtown, and clearly illustrates the potential for transit to serve a lot of people coming in from the suburbs, but also benefit those people living downtown with less traffic (and thus less pollution and less carbon load), less land needed for parking, etc. Actually a benefit to everybody.
Then, it's also motivation for people to use the service. I love to drive, but if given the choice of sitting on a train watching the scenery go by or sitting in traffic, it's an easy choice. Not to mention the expense of parking downtown, especially if you work there and need to park your car all day, every day.
The side benefit for everybody is that the road networks could be left as is, as extra capacity is no longer needed to compensate for more traffic. This benefits the entire city, as there could potentially be less money required to build new roads or modify existing ones, so there could be more tax dollars to be used in other areas than the roads. No new roads mean no need to increase snow clearing and maintenance/construction budgets, etc etc. Combine this with downtown based transit such as that which you and someone123 proposed, and it's a win for everybody IMHO.
Transit to the suburbs, such as the CN proposal gone sour, seems like low-hanging fruit that should have been easy to put in place and could have created massive benefits to the city. But, we'll never know because nobody is allowed to talk about the details.
I still think the city should get our federal representatives to see if the feds can step in and force CN to allow this to happen with more reasonable (assuming the secretive reasoning was unreasonable) terms.
As a fan of history, I find the current situation particularly sad because similar systems were already in place many years ago. Halifax had an electric rail system that ran throughout the downtown, and later electric buses. Nova Scotia had 'dayliners' - small trains that ran around the rails to allow people to commute not just to downtown, but all over the province. Rail is such an efficient form of transport (i.e. low-friction steel on steel, with minimal stop and go situations), it boggles my mind that governments at all levels could not see the benefit in maintaining those rail systems, and instead remove rails and invest heavily in roads and divert
everything to motor vehicle traffic.
Some of the changes were not all that long ago: for example the Lakeside tracks were torn up
less than 10 years ago. Think of the possibilities for commuter rail if the government hadn't ripped up all these rail lines for "rails to trails" - a sad waste of a valuable resource, IMHO.
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