Public Transit (was: today is the day)

[William Park]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 01:52:24AM -0400, Yanni Chiu wrote:
> On 25/10/10 11:27 PM, William Park wrote:
> >I live in Mississauga, and commute 100km per day.  So, I may be biased,
> >but I'm utterly opposed to Public Transit.  If city wants to assist
> >people with transportation, then city can run "public car rental".
> 
> Oh crap, I wanted to stay out of this thread, but this is too much.
> 
> William, are you also utterly opposed to Public Roads too? Those cost 
> big bucks to build and maintain.
> 
> Your position on "public car rental" (which I assume is an attempt at 
> humour), reminds me of former Premier Mike Harris, who canceled three (I 
> think the number was three) subways lines over a decade ago. With his 
> limited experience in Northern Ontario, his insight was that people got 
> into their cars to go places. That behaviour does not scale from rural 
> to urban areas. If you add cars in an urban area, eventually the roads 
> are gridlocked. If you add cars in a rural area, you run out of drivers, 
> so there's no gridlock.

Perhaps, it's rural vs urban, but it's about money too.  For some
strange reason, public transit attracts wrong type of people, solution,
and policy.  Public transit promotes increase in population density,
when public/national interest points to decrease in density.

100km is 1 hour drive, which is nothing.  You can drive to London and
back with the time you typically spend in grid-locked GTA commute.
Solution to traffic jam is reduction in population density, not more
public transit.

-- 
William

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