[OT] Public Transit

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Mel Wilson <mwilson-4YeSL8/OYKRWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org>

| For "many".  My commute, when I do it, is from south Etobicoke to central
| Markham, and that's a two-hour trip by public transit.  It can be a two-hour
| trip by road too, but it's more commonly 30..40 minutes.

The subway system is a very imperfect hub-and-spoke system.  If you
are traveling between two spokes, your transit time naturally
doubles.  Two hours is better than I would have feared.

When the subway was built, many families had only one person who
worked out of the house.  So there was a better chance that a home
could be picked to reduce commute time.  And the city was a lot
smaller: suburbs as we know them go going about the same time as the
first subway line opened.

| That said, the City of London (i.e. financial district) was handling 1 million
| commuters every weekday around the year 1920 (source: a speaker on TVO).  The
| 401/427/QEW routes are choking up now at about half that load.  There's
| clearly room to do better.

Interesting.

Most people sure didn't drive to the City then.
I think that they took a combination of the underground, buses, and trains.

The London Transit system is quite complicated (so is the road
system!).  Interestingly, I find that the stops are a bit far apart.
But it covers what I think of as London in a 2D fashion rather than
our 2.5 * 1D subway system.

[I originally wrote 2d and 1d but I didn't want you to think I was
talking about the fare.  London omnibus fare system in 1921 was 1d
(i.e. one penny) per mile according to
<http://www.archive.org/stream/electricrailwayj60mcgrrich/electricrailwayj60mcgrrich_djvu.txt>.]

Scaling transit is a tricky thing.  There seem to be phase changes in
the process.  What works for one scale of city may not work for
another: Kitchener, Ottawa, Toronto, New York.  History has a large
effect too -- London's history is so different from Toronto's that
lessons may not be very applicable.
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