turbanplanner
Senior Member
Northern light counted 8 downtown, I doubt converting 8 of them would fix any problem we're complaining about.
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- Thread starter TheTigerMaster
- Start date
crs1026
Superstar
When it’s open, Etobicoke North is helpful (with Fare Integration hopefully improving that soon) - and Finch LRT and (eventually) Crosstown to improve things as well.
But at the moment it’s a long bus ride to Line 2, or anywhere else.
- Paul
W. K. Lis
Superstar
Wonder how expensive those cars are? Are they "new", with the "latest options", or "previously cared for" or "secondhand" or "on their last legs" vehicles?
evandyk
Senior Member
I think it's a general rule that in Toronto, the wealthier you are the more likely you are to own a car. Funny enough, you're also more likely to live in leafy neighbourhoods with excellent transit and very cheap on-street parking subsidized by the city. Or even your own driveway, also subsidized by the city.
turbanplanner
Senior Member
As someone who has spent a lot of time in both areas, most a ****boxes on their last legs. A lot of factory jobs are near the airport area (the peel and Toronto side) so for anyone whose job is outside of the TTC map, commuting even as short as 7 or 8 km can take well over an hour!
To make it worse, poorer people tend to have less flexible jobs, so a subway delay can potentially get them fired, so they need a predictable commute to work. There's basically nothing on the table to help people commute across boundaries of any city. My elderly mom uses wheel trans and it's funny she can take a 50km ride no problem but a 10 km trip to york region suddenly means you end up waiting 2 hours round trip due to a double hand off.
turbanplanner
Senior Member
it's a bit of a shame it's moving, even worse service is only on weekdays.
W. K. Lis
Superstar
From link.
When horsepower was common, most people, in fact, did not own a horse. A farmer might have a draft horse, but more often he would have a mule or ox. If he was better off, he might have more than one mule or ox. Even most cowboys did not own their own horses. Ranches provided the horses, partly because there was too much work for a hand to get by with just one horse. Even a thrifty cowboy couldn’t afford to keep more than one horse.
People with more means might have a carriage horse or two. Livery stables were common. These were businesses that rented out horse-drawn carts and carriages. They also might have some riding horses to rent as well, but very few non-rich people actually rode horses if it wasn’t part of their job. Most people walked or took public transportation.
Cars in those days were luxury items. It wasn’t until mass production lowered the prices that cars became affordable to the masses. Most cars last longer and have less upkeep than horses. People who can’t buy new cars can get by with older-model used cars.
Now days horses are “luxury” items. However, you’ll find that the majority of horse owners are far from rich. While there are still working ranch and farm horses, most horses are used for recreation and sport. Whether or not a person can afford a horse depends mostly on where they live and their spending priorities. I have a horse, but my car is 18 years old (it runs fine) and I buy clothes only when my current ones wear out to the point where they can’t be repaired. I also live in an extremely rural area where hay is cheap and I can keep my horse on my own property.
While it’s true that cars are more common than horses now, it’s not true that you have to be rich to own a horse—or a car.
Mass production of the car started in the 1920’s. Ford wanted to price a car so everyone could afford 1. The horse was the main stay of transportation at this time and slowly was replaced by cars that could go further and faster than horses.
The 2 world wars took the young men to fight. So to survive and produce food the Farm started to mechanize — reducing the need for horses and workers in agriculture.
When the young men returned from war the agriculture jobs were gone —so they migrated to the city where there were jobs , public transportation to get the jobs, and a growing network of roads usable by cars. There was limited room to maintain a horse in the city.
Today the cost of enough land to maintain horses close to the city is very high and therefore the cost to own a horse for recreation and sport is high.
This is mainly true for the industrialized nations. There are many places in the world where the horse, donkey or mule are still commonly owned and used as transportation and agricultural production. And some pockets of USA — ie the Amish that maintain horses rather than cars.
From link.Horses were more often hired when necessary.
Even in farm country, you would not necessarily see all that many horses, but once you got far enough out into ranch and beef country, then you’d see horses. But they’d almost always belong to the rancher and be used by his employees.
Private horse ownership just wasn’t like it appears in the Western films, where the posse mounts up and rides on out after the criminals and it seems like everybody who needed one had a horse handy.
Incidentally, when it comes to car ownership, there are plenty of people living in cities who do not own cars today.
For some, it’s because they choose not to; they’re close enough to work to take transit or go shopping, it’s a choice they make.
For many, many more it is because cars are very expensive to own and run and they don’t have the money for it, no more than people in the past had money to buy and keep horses in the city. It’s why we still have rentals, only now they are car rentals, not horse rentals.
Stealing a horse used to be a hanging offence in Canada, because they were so very expensive. Stealing a car is not a hanging offence.
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toaster29
Active Member
I'm trying to find data on this, if anyone has any please share. What makes you think that is a general rule? I seem to remember hearing that the areas worst served by transit (far North west and North east of the city) had the highest vehicle ownership - doesn't mean they are expensive vehicles, you can find a car for $500 on Kijiji to get you from point A to B. It's not indicative of being wealthy like property ownership in this city is.
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Sunnyside
Active Member
Their getting at how the wealthiest areas of Toronto also have exceptional transit service. And those people disproportionately drive considering this access. North Toronto and Central Etobicoke are very wealthy enclaves exceptionally served by Lines 1 & 2 respectively. The folks who live here most certainly do drive more than they need. Likewise, low income places far from rapid transit in TO use transit anyway…
crs1026
Superstar
Haven’t found any recent data. A quick google found some studies from 15 years ago in other locations (BC) that suggested that the proportion of people with access to automobile use does go up with income. It was noted that while one can buy a beater for a few hundred dollars, the cost of keeping a vehicle on the road (maintenance, oil and tires, insurance) is thousands of dollars. So there is a barrier created by low income.
Another finding reported in a U of T Masters’ thesis was that people are resistant to downsizing vehicles even when income falls. And that was before trucks got as big as they are today.
Anecdotally, from spending a lot of time the last few years in a workplace paying very low wages (not as a worker) - access to a vehicle is still an enabler for new immigrants and others trying to establish themselves and get some basic upward mobility in the city. The very low income earners rely on transit only until they cross the threshold of affordability, then they add a car to the family unit. The phenomenon of growing numbers of young people living an auto free life when they can afford a car is still, frankly, a hipster thing.
PS - the point being, the studies asked about “access to” use of auto rather than personal ownership. The phenomenon at low income levels is likely that when a vehicle is first obtained, it is deployed as a family (or even extended family) resource that is used communally rather than a personal possession that is used as a lifestyle attribute. Not much different than the 1950s phenomenon when many families acquired their first vehicle, except that with multiple breadwinners in a family today, the use of a vehicle to commute is spread differently.
- Paul
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W. K. Lis
Superstar
Ride sharing (IE. Zipcar) use is going up. When one needs a car, they book a car located near them to use for a few minutes or hours. Instead of owning a car and letting it sit in the driveway, garage, or parking lot for hours when you don't use it, they use it when they need it. Like the old "livery stables" of long, long ago.
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turbanplanner
Senior Member
I was a member of car2go and autoshare before it got bought out. The ones where you return the car to the same spot are so stressful! You have to know ahead how long your trip will be and they charged a huge late fee if you cut into someone elses booking. Car2go had the right idea and there were no bookings or spots to return to but the city didn't like that. I see communato is similar but I don't see nearly as many of the free flow cars as we used to have before.
toaster29
Active Member
A very nice way of saying we don't really know, and we (both) seem to have our own anecdotes and best guesses.
ShonTron
Moderator
Downtown, the big Green P properties are mostly aboveground or underground garages: City Hall, Dundas Square, Queen/Victoria, Church/Esplanade, University/Front, Bloor/Charles, Kensington Market. There are scattered surface lots, but they become more common as you get into the urban BIA neighbourhoods like The Annex, Queen West, Danforth, etc.
Those are the ones worth redeveloping.
Those are the ones worth redeveloping.
innsertnamehere
Superstar
you have to be careful even then with blanket statements - many such lots are atop the Danforth subway line which makes redevelopment rather challenging.