Roads: HOV lanes

[Silence&Motion]

What a rich, spoiled, entitled brat! I wish we could all have the money to buy a nice big house right in the downtown core.

I hear this attitude a lot from suburbanites who object to any plans to curb car use: "I need to drive! I'm not some rich person who can afford a house downtown!" The fact is that most of the people living downtown don't own a house. They make due with apartments and condos that are less expensive that owning and maintaining a detached house in the suburbs. They also save a lot of money by not owning cars.

So let's lay off the "downtown elites vs. the average joes in the suburbs". It's not a matter of elitism, it's a matter of entitlement. Namely, that many suburbanites feel entitled to a lifestyle that never was economically or environmentally feasible.

I know that not everyone can accommodate car pooling, but FTLOG the vast majority of Toronto drivers do not need to be traveling in single-occupancy vehicles.

 

[Silence&Motion]

Just a thought, but maybe driving a car might open up your job opportunities, which in turn might get you out of that basement apartment.

Or perhaps hawc prefers living in a centrally located basement apartment in a vibrant and walkable neighbourhood to the sedentary lifestyle of sitting on a jammed expressway for hours while pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

 

[Kraylin]

FTLOG

FTLOG can people please stop using so many abbreviations these days!! You wrote a very long post then suddenly decided to throw in an abbreviation that required deciphering...

Sorry side rant ! =)

 

[nrb]

It's pretty self righteous to think that just because you don't commute via car you're somehow absolved from traffic and greenhouse gases.

Much of the traffic on the roads is commercial. All that crap you buy gets here on a truck, from groceries to your clothes. It's a much more complicated issue than simply surbubanites vs. condo dwellers. Road transportation is entwined in all of our lifestyles, so get off your moral high ground.

 

[hawc]

It's pretty self righteous to think that just because you don't commute via car you're somehow absolved from traffic and greenhouse gases. Much of the traffic on the roads is commercial. All that crap you buy gets here on a truck, from groceries to your clothes. It's a much more complicated issue than simply surbubanites vs. condo dwellers. Road transportation is entwined in all of our lifestyles, so get off your moral high ground.

Not my fault truckers have fixed it that way. Way more stuff could be delivered by rail with local trucks just making the final delivery from the rail yard, rather than trucking stuff between cities, provinces and across the country. It's not self righteous to think things are broken and we need a serious rethink of our entire way of life to fix it. It's not about being on a moral high ground it's about being on the right side of history. This can't continue.

 

[hawc]

Or perhaps hawc prefers living in a centrally located basement apartment in a vibrant and walkable neighbourhood to the sedentary lifestyle of sitting on a jammed expressway for hours while pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Yes, exactly. Thank you! Get out of the car and smell the roses I like to say.

 

[DarnDirtyApe]

Nice troll hawc. Well played...

 

[aquateam]

Cars are bad. The less people driving the better. We need to do everything we can to discourage driving. The more miserable we can making commuting the less likely people are to drive. Which is good. So that said, these HOV lanes should become permanent. We need to make driving so painful that people are forced to car pool where the wouldn't otherwise. If all these selfish drivers would put two more people in their car instead of just commuting all by themselves they'd have nothing to complain about, they'd be in the HOV lanes. Ideally we'd remove highways like the DVP and Gardiner entirely and replace with transit and bike lanes. But until them I'm so enjoying the 2 months of HOV hell that will snap drivers out of their dependency on the car. Driving must be discouraged at every possible opportunity and this is a GREAT start!

I think it's better not to villify drivers when we need their support for investment in other modes of transport. Pilloring the 71% of GTA commuters who travel by car is not a good way to win them to the cause, and talking about replacing the DVP with bike lanes is a sure way to convince even people who support public transit that you've gone off the deep end.

I hope that they keep these HOV lanes, even after the games are over. I know some drivers hate them, but they serve a good purpose:
1) They improve the response time of EMS vehicles. Everyone should be able to get behind this.
2) They have a higher through-put of people. When traffic grinds to a halt, having a lane that is still free-flowing means that people are still able to get to their destination. That's because congestion is a highly non-linear function of the number of vehicles in the lane, not the number of people taking it.
3) They provide an advantage to mass transit to put it on a more equal footing with personal automobiles. It is important that mass transit be competitive, otherwise even more people would be in their cars causing traffic.
4) They promote carpooling. As I mentioned in 2), the number of vehicles (not people) causes congestion. When a vehicle has 4 people in it, they cause 1/4th of the congestion that a SOV causes. If the average occupancy of vehicles on the highway doubled (from 1.3 to 2.6, not unreasonable) then imagine how smoothly traffic would flow with half the number of cars on the road!

 

[andrewpmk]

The only way that making the HOV lanes permanent is acceptable is to widen the roads. Putting HOV lanes on a road that is 3 lanes wide and narrowing it to 2 lanes causes massive traffic jams and is unacceptable. On the wider roads where there are temporarily HOV lanes (401 and 427) and roads that already have HOV lanes (404 and the west part of the QEW) this isn't an issue. Certainly these lanes speed up GO buses (though you would need a massive expansion of GO bus service to make this useful) but hardly anyone carpools so the HOV lanes are pretty much empty, particularly with the 3+ restriction. The only way I would support HOV lanes on the DVP is if the city widens it to 4 or 5 lanes each way, which is badly needed anyway. Also the endless road closures that shut down the DVP, Gardiner and Lake Shore need to be cancelled permanently.

 

[mpd618]

Putting HOV lanes on a road that is 3 lanes wide and narrowing it to 2 lanes causes massive traffic jams and is unacceptable.

There are also massive traffic jams from construction, but yet we suffer through. In this case, like construction, the traffic jams would be temporary. Some people would shift to carpooling, some to different times of day, more people would shift to transit, etc. And the massive traffic jams would decrease to normal jams.

I have to say - those normal rush hour jams are completely unacceptable, and it certainly is not acceptable to postpone fixing those for transit until some widening 10 years down the road. Why are GO buses filled with 50 people each stuck in single-occupant vehicle traffic? We don't have to accept that.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Was stuck on the DVP south yesterday, total gridlock at 7:30pm due to the HOV lanes. Then I noticed that motorcycles are allowed, and indeed I saw dozens riding up and down the road as I was stuck. So, during the period we have HOV lanes on the DVP I'm riding my motorbike to work.

 

[Tuscani01]

Was stuck on the DVP south yesterday, total gridlock at 7:30pm due to the HOV lanes. Then I noticed that motorcycles are allowed, and indeed I saw dozens riding up and down the road as I was stuck. So, during the period we have HOV lanes on the DVP I'm riding my motorbike to work.

Must've been an accident or something. I went southbound at 5 and it was wide open without any traffic. It's usually pretty light at 7:30, so I cant imagine that the HOV lanes would be the cause of gridlock at 7:30 when there wasn't any gridlock during the actual rush hour.

 

[salsa]

Must've been an accident or something. I went southbound at 5 and it was wide open without any traffic. It's usually pretty light at 7:30, so I cant imagine that the HOV lanes would be the cause of gridlock at 7:30 when there wasn't any gridlock during the actual rush hour.

Torontonians will be blaming the Pan Am games for every single traffic jam in the GTA. I think they will be pretty disappointed when the games are over and discover that traffic still sucks as always. Yesterday my parents had a guest come over to their house. She drove from her new home at Eglinton & Caledonia (where she just moved) to Bathurst & Sheppard. She said it took almost an hour to drive that distance because of the traffic on Eglinton, "thanks to the Pan Am games". I was pretty sure it's the LRT construction that's to blame, but why let reality get in the way of a good rant about the games.

 

[nfitz]

Yes you do! You just haven't tried hard enough. There are plenty of carpooling apps out there. You should definitely be able to find 2 other people heading your way. Or take the GO train. Or move closer to where you work. Commuters like you are what's contributing to climate change. Hopefully this will make you re-examine your selfish lifestyle and stop using up the earth's resources (while polluting the atmosphere) for your comfort. Consider this a wake up call for you and hundreds of thousands of other people that don't walk, cycle or take transit to work. There's no reason to own a car if you plan ahead.

Which carpooling app allows you to find someone who is visiting all the same multiple worksites in one day?!?!

Did you even read what he wrote?

 

[nfitz]

Was stuck on the DVP south yesterday, total gridlock at 7:30pm due to the HOV lanes. Then I noticed that motorcycles are allowed, and indeed I saw dozens riding up and down the road as I was stuck. So, during the period we have HOV lanes on the DVP I'm riding my motorbike to work.

Hope your donor card is filled out.

Seriously though ... likely a taste of things to come. With more and more housing downtown (look at what is going to happen to the Pan Am village), and more people commuting further north, I'd expect in a few more years, that's what the DVP will always look like at 7:30 - but with no HOV lanes for the bikes!

It's certainly already noticeably worse heading south in the PM peak and afterwards than it was 10 years ago.