Imagine a parking garage at Washago. In that parking garage are a hundred or more rental cars. Outside of the station is a transit terminal with bus bays. So, instead of taking your car and crawling along the 400 to get to your cottage, you take the train and then for the major marinas, a bus takes you there. For those places that are off the beaten path,you rent a car. You could get rid of at least half the traffic. on the 400 during the long weekends. Is this a fantasy? To some degree it very much is.However, it is something that could be done. Obviously there would be a high cost in much of this, but it could be a reality. The problem is we are so addicted to our cars that the thought of this sounds preposterous. Those very stations do exist to some extent along the QC-W corridor. I can get to many of the major stations and not need a car to continue to my destination.
There is a big difference between "having an addiction" and "finding sufficient utility to make it worth crawling along in traffic".
Most people I know who do the cottage thing on weekends take along sufficient baggage that they would not be eager to schlep it all to Union, board the train, and then transfer the baggage into a shared use vehicle at the end of the trip. Plus, most people I know enjoy the flexibility of deciding exactly when they will leave and when they will return, stopping if need be or at a whim, etc. Most have favourite restaurants and supermarkets along the way.
From the government's perspective, there really isn't an expense to having the highways fill up for a few hours and then empty out a few hours later. The users feel the pain, not the government, and most accept whatever inconvenience or delay is imposed. So investing money to reduce use of the highway (which at this point is a sunk cost and won't be expanding much), when demand regulates itself, is not a compelling thing.
Now, if government decided to add extra lanes for the highway just to handle the Friday/Sunday peak.... knowing those lanes will be empty the rest of the week.... one might argue that the highway expansion is a poor investment. But I'm not seeing as much of that incessant congestion as one might think. It's the stretch of the 401 from Dixie to 404 that never empties out, from pre dawn to midnight, seven days a week..... not the 400 or 404.
The indirect costs of the cottage traffic (added policing, damage and injury or even death due to added collisions, delays to those whose time is money) are pretty hard to quantify. But more importantly - can they actually be reduced in a way that compells action? It's quite arguable that we could propbably fund a train with the money we would save in insurance claims from the reduction in accidents if the weekend rush were reduced - but, can we actually extract that money in a tangible way?
I do think a commuter service from Cottage Country into the city would be popular, but I would base it around people who have the ability to work from their cottage home and only come to the city for business or appointments, and usually do so with little luggage, maybe a briefcase or laptop. Those people would find utility in not driving. They would likely not be daily commuters, but there might be enough doing one day a week that the train would fill up every weekday. So yeah a parking garage at Washago might have utility. The Northlander will sort of be on that schedule, so maybe that demand will be measurable when the train starts running. But if those folks already drive to Bradford and ride GO.....the added train adds no further utility, and GO is more frequent so may be more attractive even if there is a longer drive at the outer end.
But my point is, a mantra of "car bad, train good" is not realistic. We have to study transportation habits and do insightful business cases. In many cases, the use of private autos is rational and delivers more value than a train would..... even if driving in stop and start traffic is unpleasant.
- Paul
