What improvements need to be made to improve mobility in a car? I can get everywhere by car and there is no place in Toronto more than 10km from the nearest freeway and all the freeways are connected to each other. Vancouver doesn't even have a freeway to get between the 1 and 99 freeways. Many cities outside North America don't have a freeway in the core and besides one or two "grand avenues" don't have a network of four lane plus turning lane roads. If you look at the development of our transit system as compared to our road system and look at the balance compared to other place with good transit systems like London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo I think it is obvious that our roadway system is much further developed than our transit system and when there are comparable expressway systems in large cities they are primarily toll routes and usually have only two lanes in each direction. Our transit system needs to catch up while our free use freeways with up to 8 lanes in each direction and four lane arterial routes with turning lanes seem quite adequate.
Well, yes, our road system is much more advanced and established than our transit network. However, building roads at the same time might be the kind of Faustian bargain we need in order to get a decent transit network set up. My argument was that very few cities have aggressively built transit lines while completely neglecting roads. To do so invites political squabbling that eventually sinks transit expansion, as we Torontonians are acutely aware.
We might not need to build roads, per se, to improve car-based mobility in the city. For starters, we could build more Green P parking garages and eliminate on-street parking to build a bicycle lane. This would be a win-win for motorists, merchants and bicyclists. The Toronto approach, however, would be to attempt to eliminate on-street parking without making any parking concessions. Of course, this ends in a protracted fight between the city and merchants and we end up absolutely nowhere.
Another mobility improvement would be to dedicate former on-street parking space on side streets for delivery vehicles so that they don't end up blocking the right lane of major roads during rush hour. Again, to do this we would have to drive a hard bargain as transit supporters and make sure that if this is done, a transit improvement of equal effort is performed elsewhere.
I am afraid that this is the only way to make inroads (no pun intended) in transit in this city. We cannot afford a war on cars because, frankly, we are already losing.
