Carjacked: An Anthropology of Americans and their Automobiles

[Chuck]

Just don't forget that population and employment are growing. I'm going to throw some arbitrary numbers out there: today, there might be 5,000,000 people in the inner GTA and 80% of trips are made by cars. Supposed that in 20 years, there will be 7,000,000 people and only 60% of trips are made by cars thanks to various initiatives. Under this scenario, transit's modal share will have fully doubled, and yet there will still be hundreds of thousands of more cars on the road than today. The GTA needs historically massive investment in transit and bike lanes, but we cannot afford to lose a single lane of traffic on most arterial roads and highways, Jarvis included in my opinion (should have put that bike lane on Yonge instead). Transit infrastructure must grow exponentially, but in terms of roads, we need to at least maintain what we've got.

 

[Electrify]

One solution could be to make some already existing streets transit and LRT only corridors, with only delivery and emergency vehicles on the sides of them, and to also construct additional highways and roads to compensate for that loss so it can be faster travel for everyone.

I've always thought that Queen, and maybe even King, would be a good to turn into a LRT/bike/pedestrian route through downtown. Especially since Richmond and Adelaide are SOOOO much better to use to get across the Business District.

 

[Second_in_pie]

Just don't forget that population and employment are growing. I'm going to throw some arbitrary numbers out there: today, there might be 5,000,000 people in the inner GTA and 80% of trips are made by cars. Supposed that in 20 years, there will be 7,000,000 people and only 60% of trips are made by cars thanks to various initiatives. Under this scenario, transit's modal share will have fully doubled, and yet there will still be hundreds of thousands of more cars on the road than today. The GTA needs historically massive investment in transit and bike lanes, but we cannot afford to lose a single lane of traffic on most arterial roads and highways, Jarvis included in my opinion (should have put that bike lane on Yonge instead). Transit infrastructure must grow exponentially, but in terms of roads, we need to at least maintain what we've got.

I agree. We shouldn't be sacrificing car capacity for transit. But we shouldn't be increasing car infrastructure. We need to pump huge amounts of money into transit and bike infrastructure though. Having fully regional go service on all lines by 2030 is a necessity to do this, with all day service on all lines by 2020. We'll need to hugely expand the subway network all across Toronto and into York and Mississauga, and get more busses rolling everywhere. Expropriate lawn space along suburban roads and add fully separated bike lanes that feed into subway and Go routes. I think that with all that and some TOD, you could do better than 60% car modal share. But this isn't what's happening and we're still getting rid of car capacity, so the future currently looks bleak.