jaybe
Active Member
I've never understood what the point of this statistic is. If very few people are taking transit from Scarborough to the rest of the city, and a lot of people are driving from Scarborough to the rest of the city, the logical deduction is that public transit within Scarborough is just fine (in other words, the Eglinton East LRT is low-priority), and what needs to be improved is the area's connection to the rest of Toronto.
Anyways, Scarborough is one quarter of Toronto's area. I think that you'd get a similar 70% figure for any given quarter of Toronto. A lot of people live close to where they work, a lot of students take short transit trips, and a lot of people use the TTC to run errands in their neighbourhood.
People will be a lot less likely to take it if it's out of the way and invisible from the main street. The LRT itself might be a bit faster, but the time that a lot of passengers will spend walking 15 minutes away from Finch completely negates that benefit.
I read the study, although it was several years ago. If I recall, the study looked at all trips, not just trips by transit. The results were similar to the 70% you quoted, most trips are made within Scarborough. Of interest, a significant number of Scarborough residents make their way north to commute to work in Markham and Richmond Hill. It then focused in on transit trips. Downtown was the ultimate destination for something like 13% of commuters.
While it could be a chicken and egg thing - no transit therefore no commuters - that keeps downtown commuters from moving to Scarborough, it is likely much more complex. Bottom line, the $3B, one-stop SSE is a very expensive experiment to test this theory. Even worse, it takes funds from other projects that would knowingly improve transit for far more transit users in Scarborough.