The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail

What people said

jodrellblank · 2023-08 · Recommendation

There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station , and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. "The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail" - [VIDEO] - "Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)" [it's not walkable] - [LINK] - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - "America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)" - [LINK] - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - [LINK]

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mperham · 2023-05 · Reference

Building giant parking garages ("commuting park and ride") is a failed concept and does not work. No one wants to live around a giant parking area and no one will walk through it to get to the train because there's no housing density nearby. Better to build high density housing around the station with little parking. [VIDEO]

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throw0101a · 2022-04 · Reference

> The more you add road capacity, the less 'demand is induced', because there's limited amount of people. And how much money would it cost to build out enough road infrastructure to 'overwhelm all possible demand'? How much would it cost to move the same amount of people via some other form of transportation? The province of Ontario finds it cheaper to run an entire railway (GO Transit) compared to being able to build out enough highway infrastructure (and it's not like they've stop building that): * [VIDEO] And that's just the road infrastructure: what about things like parking space at the destination(s) of where all these folks are going? How much area would have to be bulldozed for all of this?

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