The guy in the next office to mine is the fittest guy I know....cycles daily after work and cycles competitively....not an ounce of fat on the guy......lives, also, about a 5 - 7 minute walk from a subway station....our office sits atop a subway station......does not have company paid parking in our building........drives his prius to the office every single day!
He is just an example....like I said, most of my friends work in the towers down here.....most, unlike me, live in the city and most in very nice 'hoods near the subway.....and they seldom use the subway. I would say I use public transit more than anyone in my social network.....and they don't understand why I do.
I think there is a lot higher stigma attached to public transit in the upper-middle class - wealthy community in this city than we like to admit.
If you're important enough, your workplace will pay for your parking as part of compensation. Heck, if you are important enough, there will be somebody else driving you to work. And this is not as uncommon as many here would think. A parking pass is miniscule to how much a trader makes his bank. These guys also get free meals and booze. You think the bank cares about $20-$25 per day in parking?
This is UT. It's a bit of a bubble from reality. It's very true. Transit is very much a second choice for those that are well off. And the irony here (from the UT point of view) is that the closer you live to the core (in all those public transit accessible areas), the easier it is to drive to work. The marginal cost may be higher in relative terms, but it's low in absolute terms. If takes you 20 mins on transit but 30 mins in a car, sure your commute is 50% longer, but it's also only 10 minutes longer and you're not standing the whole way in a crowded subway car. For some that's a good trade-off.
In my experience, this set of folks, supports public transit like they do communism: great idea for everyone else.
To be clear, we are talking about people who live in Old Toronto and maybe East York. That's a radius I would say would allow relatively easy access to the core. And we are talking a subset who are also truly well off. Not just 100k per year, which is solidly middle class these days in Hogtown.
I have gone back and excerpted a couple of posts from a discussion we were having about business/upper middle class/wealthy and their use/attitudes to transit. If you want to see the rest of it you can go back to the area of the discussion.
The reason I bring it up is because I was reminded of it today.
Was part of a 3 company (two people from each company) business lunch. The lunch was at the corner of Yonge and Price (just south of Summerhill).
Two of the people were coming from their office near Yonge and Belmont. (profile, both people who live in the city near subways). They drove to the lunch....because after lunch they had to go to a meeting at Yonge and King which they intended to (in fact did) drive to.
Two people came from the TD Centre .....they cabbed to the lunch (again, both city dwellers...one typically takes subway to work the other drives).
These four had never met each other and over lunch were intrigued that they lived, co-incidently, so close to each other no one north of Lawrence, no one east of Mt Pleasant, no one west of Avenue road.
The other two were coming from an office at King and University and took the subway.
During the lunch there was a minor diversion from the business purpose to "moving around this city" 3 openly mocked the idea of using public transit (not surprisingly since two of those had literally driven the distance of a 5 minute walk because they needed their car nearby to drive downtown after the lunch......the guy from the TD Centre who typically takes the subway was quiet during this discussion - I suspect because his boss was one of the mockers).
After the lunch the two who had driven raced out to get in their car to get downtown....the two who had cabbed there said to the subwayers "did you guys really take the subway?"....."yep"...."ok, why don't you share our cab back downtown?"..."because subway will get us there faster"...."yeah, I guess it will.....TAXI!".
Seriously, this is a common thing that happens all the time......means nothing but since we had had that discussion so recently, it popped into my mind on the short subway ride back to St. A.