Fresh Start
Banned
^ If GO Transit was more affordable I'd never have use for the TTC at all. I'd just cycle to Guildwood GO Stn everyday and be downtown within 20 minutes. To do the same journey via TTC from my house takes 1 hr 15 mins.
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If we do no enhance the service from the suburbs, then we would not be putting them in a worse position, would we?
Jobs have already gone to the suburbs, because of lower taxes.
Can this get worse... I don't know. I don't think that the downtown locations are that hard to reach, are they? If anything, moving more people to the suburbs would create this on their streets - http://msnbcmedia4.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/060801/060801_trafficJams_hmed_1p.hmedium.jpg - thus making their streets enjoyably and moving business back to the city?
But all things aside, I just don't see a rush of businesses from the CBD going to say vughan or somewhere. There are certain established patterns. Suburbs are naturally trying to change this, to take as much as they can from the city itself... things changed somewhat... how far will they continue? I hope that higher petrol prices are putting a stop to this, but higher prices alone won't do the job. There has to be more.
This whole idea of living close to the inner city shoots the idea of living close to where you work all to hell. I don't suppose it's occurred to suburbanite living that maybe it's a shorter commute or closer to where their kids go to school or university/college.
Petrol prices has long way to go before they can significantly affect people's travel patterns. Note that two large parts of the car ownership cost are insurance and amortization. So, even if petrol prices double, the total cost of car ownership might increase by 20% or 30% - more than enough to get people complaining, but not enough to force them into public transit without a major improvement in its quality.
So, if you discorage suburb-to-core trips by refusing to enhance public transit, it can push some people to live closer to the core, but as a side effect it can prompt people who reside in suburbs to seek employment in other suburbs. And that means increasing the total number of car kilometers driven per day.
They pay their taxes like everyone else in the city so they should get good transit service as well. Yes they will be more expensive to serve on a per-capita basis than inner city folk but at the same time they do not enjoy the cultural {and city subsidized} events and civic entertainment options.
In 1998, we amalgamated Toronto and the boroughs, so instead of having East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, and York sprall independently, they are held to the same rules as Toronto proper.
The US is an oil importer, Canada is an oil exporter. They feel the prices more acutely and don't gain anything nationally.In the US when gas reached 4 dollars a gallon two summers ago people were freaking out. I saw the go's equivalent here pass by - may times there were so many people standing. You like see through the windows that the train is cramped. Naturally people were fed up by high gas prices. There was panic here. And it triggered the current economic recession, as it started the housing bust in the exurbs.
So you don't think turn-about would be fair play? Give people living in the core a chance to reverse commute? One reason why jobs when to the suburbs than Toronto is because Toronto is more expensive.Those people drive all the time anyways. They can look all they want - if jobs are not moved from the downtown then their search is pointless.
At any rate, the point is that at the minimum GO transit should not be improved in order to put more blood into the suburbs - we should want our blood back in toronto itself.
Mississauga is the 6th largest city in Canada. Are you saying that the Government of Ontario Transit shouldn't spend money to provide transit between them? Instead, the only people in Ontario that deserve better transit live in Toronto?Screw the entertainment for all I care. In the world of authoritarian LAz, all clubs would be closed. Creepy, ain't it?
But anyways, we should not be spending money to help upgrade transit in the suburbs, as it is needed more in the city itself.
Like the Greater Toronto Servicing Board? Harris and the Ontario PC Party did a great job stuffing our potential in the 90s. Toronto's budget has been hemoraging ever since the provience downloaded services and cut funding. The City/Metro Toronto divide just added to the disfunction. Since then TTC budget has been a political tool for the suburbs and the current state of affairs reflects two decades of fannying about.The regional government metropolitan toronto coordinated development so that all these guys were on the same page. Now metro toronto is a lame duck. In 1998 - and even before - they needed another metropolitan government that would reign in other suburbs. That would have prevented companies from going away to the suburbs.
More people do drive from the suburbs than use GO Trains, but not from want of trying. I think something like 80% of GO Trains currently run at over 90% seating capacity. More people drive than walk, but does that mean we shouldn't build sidewalks?Only in the context of producing railroad suburbs can I see there some merit in this. But we do not have railroad suburbs - we have auto suburbs where life is dependent on the auto.
It would not surprise me if more people from the suburbs drive into downtown than take go to it.
The US is an oil importer, Canada is an oil exporter. They feel the prices more acutely and don't gain anything nationally.
So you don't think turn-about would be fair play? Give people living in the core a chance to reverse commute? One reason why jobs when to the suburbs than Toronto is because Toronto is more expensive.
Mississauga is the 6th largest city in Canada. Are you saying that the Government of Ontario Transit shouldn't spend money to provide transit between them? Instead, the only people in Ontario that deserve better transit live in Toronto?
More people do drive from the suburbs than use GO Trains
This may come as a surprise to some, but Toronto is NOT the center of the universe, and there is a whole world beyond Eglinton - a world that may not be accessible by public transit.
And as anti-car as some are here, is there any city or country on the planet that has shunned auto transportation entirely?
Besides the fact that most of the job growth in the GTHA is occuring beyond Toronto's city limits (hey 416ers, get the hell off of MY roads!!!), our goal should be to reduce car dependancy, not to kill the car entirely.
Fact is cities grow ... but we can make sure that future growth focuses on intensifying density rather than increasing sprawl.
Electrify is saying that upwards in the suburbs is more than okay, because they're already there. If upwards growth in Markham or Mississauga is bad, then we should also consider STC or NYCC bad as well, but it's obviously not the case. And what makes Toronto such an angel that it can cope with planned growth? I guess you missed the dozens of new mid-rises going up in Markham around MTC, or the town meetings in Richmond Hill and Vaughan for their new downtown centres. The point is that nobody's really planning their growth out that well, and planning is something that needs to be going on extensively at least in the GGH, if not all of Canada.The very building of these places is what is increasing car dependancy. So you want to continue to build them up, thereby taking more of toronto out of toronto, while claiming that it would help them - no thanks. That's a one sided relationship. I bet only a small fraction of the people take Go anyways. My experience in the US is that people do not take commuter lines into town, nor do they even bother to go to the city often.
The main problem is not identified in this wording - unplanned growth.
What you propose can easily be the market doing whatever it wants - that is a big disaster. Unplanned growth is a failure. Planned growth is what put toronto on par with the best cities of the world by the 1980s. Since then we have had a nose dive downwards.
But this is where the shit will really fly....................................short of divine intervention and Toronto gets a shit load of money, turn the Stubway into LRT. Yes you heard it here first kids transfer to LRT.