Public Transit (was: today is the day)

[Thomas Milne]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:57 AM, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

Okay, so the solution is a massive Soviet-style relocation of the
populace, not a few million for some streetcars. Amazing. Only the
most selfish, ideologically-driven car fanatic could come up with that
one. Yeah, William, we'll move out all the undesirables for you, so
you can continue to drive your pwecious wittle car :-)

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

-- 
TBM
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