today is the day

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 07:03:05PM -0400, William Muriithi wrote:
> > Well anyone that thinks street cars should be replaced by busses
> > because leaving room for cars is a good thing is nuts.  Your best bet
> > is to elliminate most cars from downtown.  Other major cities around
> > the world have done it and boy does it make things better.
> 
> Well said Sorensen.  I really can never get how someone can consider
> himself/herself a leader when they are ignorant of such hard fact.

I also wonder how much more it would cost to operate busses rather
than streetcars.  Streetcars have very few parts to service (electric
motors need very little service compared to a combustion engine, never
mind the hybrid busses that have a combustion engine, a generator and
electric motors).  Streetcars move a lot more people using one driver
than a bus can.  So using busses means more drivers to pay, more busses
than streetcars to service and higher service cost per vehicle too.
I don't know what TTC drivers make, but I still think needing less of
them must be cheaper.

Now the advantage of the bus is that is doesn't get stuck if another bus
breaks down on the route or some car decides to have a crash in front
of it.  That doesn't seem to be that big a deal in general though but
perhaps I am wrong about how many issues the streetcars run into.
The dedicated streetcar ways seem to work pretty well at avoiding
traffic though.  Of course busses can have the same thing if you are
willing to dedicate streets to them like Ottawa has done.  Given the
hatred of streetcars being in the way of cars I highly doubt Ford wants
to give busses any right of ways.

Now as for doing what other major cities around the world have done,
how about banning cars from queen street and only allowing streetcars
there along with bicycles and pedestrians.  With all the stores around
that would probably be really nice.  It isn't as if driving on queen
street ever gets you anywhere.  Cetainly doesn't get you to the stores
because there is never parking available.

> > If transit worked well, people would not want to drive into downtown.
> > So the solution is to fix transit, not make it better for cars (because
> > you can never make enough room for cars in downtown toronto to avoid
> > traffic problems, and the streetcars are not the problem).  If you want
> > cars to have an easier time, elliminate pedestrians.  They get in the
> > way of cars all the time.  :)
> The biggest problem is actually not the space.  If that was the only
> problem, I would be open to debating on the pro and cons of being car
> friendly.  The biggest problem is sustainability of that mode of
> transport.
> 
> We have the oil price being $83 per barrel despite all the developed
> countries being barely above recession.  It should therefore be
> plainly obvious to anybody who consider themselves a leader the moment
> growth will reach around 2% in most developed countries, oil prices
> will go past $100 again.  Actually, even if we do not have any growth
> going forward, we will still have oil selling above $130 in 2015. If
> we will still be heavily dependent of oil at that time, that shock
> alone will push us back into a recession.

Does anyone know why we have gas at $1.10/L with oil at $83/barrel when
a couple of years ago we had gas at $1.10/L with oil at $130/barrel?
How does this work exactly?

> That alone should imply we should be investing every dollars we have
> on less oil depended transport mode.  People like Ford are managers,
> but I do not unfortunately perceive him as a leader.  Sure, he may
> balance the budget, but what good is that if he leaves the city barely
> unable to survive an impending calamity. We have been running
> governments like business and we will pay dearly for it.

I think Ford is trying to cater to short term complaints rather than
long term solutions.

I don't particularly like the idea of tolls for driving in Toronto that
some have proposed, but that's probably mostly because transit in Toronto
is so bad.  Now if someone would fix transit and then after they fixed
transit they implemented tolls, then I would probably be OK with that.
I unfortunately suspect that they would be more likely to introduce tolls,
get used to the extra funding, and still not fix transit.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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