City's poor stranded in suburbs

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http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/302992

Feb 13, 2008 04:30 AM
Sean Geobey



Getting ready in the morning usually means grabbing your car keys or your bus pass. Which one of these you take says a lot less about who you are than about where you are.

In Canada's big cities, only half of adults who live in the downtown core drive every day. Outside this core, four out of five adults drive every day, which is natural since fewer interesting places are within walking distance.

In the newer suburban developments in the quickest-growing parts of the 905 region, walking to the nearest grocery store can seem like an epic trip. In Canada's suburbs, where you work, play, eat and sleep might well be in totally different areas of the community. This makes a car your ticket into a full suburban life.

There is a cost to buying, fuelling and fixing cars, much like housing downtown is expensive. Those are the trade-offs we make when deciding where to live, and building higher-density housing in the city is key to pulling more cars off the road.

What is interesting then is the relationship between driving and density. Outside downtown Toronto, it does not matter whether people live in highrise apartments or bungalows, car usage seems to be about the same. While we expect people to drive more in Mississauga or Vaughan, the similar driving patterns in places like Rexdale or the Jane/Finch corridor seem surprising, yet these are the results of a recent Statistics Canada report on car use in our cities. Density alone does not keep people out of their cars.

However, poverty does. The densely populated but poorly transit-serviced "inner suburbs" between the city core and the 905-belt suburbs are where our young, our people in transition, and our new Canadians cluster. These pockets of poverty contain many people without the cars to access services in the suburbs and must instead take long transit rides to go downtown.

Because of this, the least economically secure members of our communities are saddled with very time-consuming commutes. A revived mass transit system would ease their burden, but it could create another one elsewhere in the system.

Right now, the main transit bottleneck for people in the inner suburbs is the bus stop. More frequent busing from residential areas to the subways means crowded platforms along the entire subway system. When more people get on the subways at Kipling and Kennedy, there will be longer waits for subways at every station in between.

While a transit revival is key to supporting new urban density, looking to transit alone would be short-sighted. Just transporting people from Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough to downtown is not enough to sustain our city.

A better approach would include a mix of better transit and local development. More entertainment, employment and service clusters outside the city core would improve the lives of those who live in some of our most underserved communities.

The United Kingdom has been wrestling with modern urbanization longer than anyone else, and in the past 15 years there have been a number of successful "urban village" developments. These mixed-use neighbourhoods are designed to be walkable and environmentally sustainable while still providing transit access to more densely populated urban cores. Urban villages promote neighbourhood diversity, and while they accept cars as important to a city, the approach does not view car ownership as a necessity.

Needing a car locks too many people out of a full urban life. For too many Torontonians, the city they love is far from home.

Sean Geobey is an economist and writer.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

The poor transit in these areas can be addressed incredibly quickly and cheaply by implementing Rocket bus routes on arterial roads...the nodal nature of all the apartment clusters makes this a no brainer. It may not be life-altering for people at Kipling & Finch or Kingston & Lawrence, but it'd be an easy partial solution.

 

[paraone]

I have never seen the point of these rocket bus routes.... sure you'll slice a few minutes off of the route and it would be an improvement for existing customers, but I don't think buses will ever attract new ridership. Nobody wants to get out of their car and sit in a bus going down the same street, just at half the speed.

 

[jeicow]

I think people will have no problem taking Rocket Routes as long as they provide for a quicker service. One thing that gets me about some "Express" buses is the fact that they pretty much make every third stop of a regular route, but of course the two they skip are the ones people never really get of at anyways.

I think a decent model for how an express bus can get peope would be the iXpress route in K/W/C. It cuts off a huge amount of time compared to the regular 7 routes, and stops at the major desinations people want. But it's major advantage is that they actually took the time to make it stand out from the regular bus network by actually writing iXpress on the side of most buses, having distinctive stops, and advertising it in the region. It's similar to Viva in ways, but without the pimped out buses (which I really am suspect to consider their price)

 

[lordmandeep]

Nobody wants to get out of their car and sit in a bus going down the same street, just at half the speed.
Reply With Quote

Not unless it goes to a subway...

 

[paraone]

still don't think that will add much ridership, if we really want to make any sort of meaningful dent in traffic we have to think heavy rail.
There is now way to get people to abandon their cars for a bus, no matter what gimmick you use, save for open bar and hooter girls, then it would be packed I'm sure.

PS, I find the term "express" laughable.... it's still stuck on the same traffic choked road as the local

 

[scarberiankhatru]

I have never seen the point of these rocket bus routes.... sure you'll slice a few minutes off of the route and it would be an improvement for existing customers, but I don't think buses will ever attract new ridership. Nobody wants to get out of their car and sit in a bus going down the same street, just at half the speed.

Yeah, god forbid we actually try to improve service for people already using the TTC or those without unfettered 24/7 access to a car. No one living outside the old city of Toronto would ever say Rocket routes are pointless. The 190 saves (by my very rough estimate) 1 minute per km, which is why its ridership is several times higher than forecasted and why service has been added to the route every year since it started running.

If you had read the article, you'd realize Geobey is talking about people without cars that already take transit, not about luring drivers to the TTC to decrease traffic. Since you brought it up, though, yes, people will take buses if you offer them better bus service. They'd prefer trains or subways, but Rocket buses are extremely quick and cheap to add...rail is not.

 

[lordmandeep]

however the TTC should not ever think that the TTC are all poor people who have nothing else.

There are many choice riders and that is why the TTC has to keep a higher level of service.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

There's even lots of choice riders in Rexdale and Malvern. Rocket routes would help poor people as well as choice riders. There's really no point in distinguishing between them...it will help riders.

 

[W. K. Lis]

What about the report that says that doctors rarely report unfit drivers as well. The 905 needs their car to get around. If they are poor and have to drive, we can have even worse troubles. The poor can't or are unable to use cabs, whether due to expense or not. The infrequency of the 905 buses restrict mobility to the daylight hours, they don't even have all-night service. The poor in the 905 end up as prisoners.
Or they end up in Toronto.

 

[nfitz]

I think a decent model for how an express bus can get peope would be the iXpress route in K/W/C. It cuts off a huge amount of time compared to the regular 7 routes, and stops at the major desinations people want.

I disagree. I looked at using it to get from Conestoga Mall to downtown Kitchener - however it was significantly slower than the regular 7C bus. For example, the 4 pm departure from Conestoga Mall gets into the downtown terminal at 4:37 pm. However the 4:10 pm 7C departure gets in at 4:34 pm! For this routing, it's actually significantly slower than the regular bus - and this is over about half the trip length of the route!

 

[urbandreamer]

Hmm I used the iXpress quite extensively when I used to live/work in k-w: the concept and execution is brilliant imo. I liked it because the average rider is more upwardly mobile and/or younger (ie mostly UW/WLU students) versus the more working class/old people/high school set of the 7C. Plus, having taken the 7C a billion times made me bored of the route: a few more minutes to pass by UW etc made iXpress more interesting ride. I think it now operates 7 days a week which is nice too

There's one thing weird about k-w region though: for only $2.75 bus fare you can ride 25 miles in the summer (St Jacob's to south Cambridge.) Will one fare get you from downtown Toronto to Oakville (roughly same distance?)

 

[CDL.TO]

One fare and a whole lotta time will get you from Markham to Hamilton.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

Humber College is only one fare, 50km, and about 4 hours away from the 54A's Starspray Loop...

 

[jeicow]

I disagree. I looked at using it to get from Conestoga Mall to downtown Kitchener - however it was significantly slower than the regular 7C bus. For example, the 4 pm departure from Conestoga Mall gets into the downtown terminal at 4:37 pm. However the 4:10 pm 7C departure gets in at 4:34 pm! For this routing, it's actually significantly slower than the regular bus - and this is over about half the trip length of the route!

The times on the iXpress schedule for Charles Terminal are departure times, while for the 7C it's the arrival time. If anything- they'll get in at the same time at worst. But when you take into consider that in the same amount of time, the iXpress covers a lot more ground and serves more destination nodes (R&T Park, UW, front of Laurier), while 7C just serves the eastern side of Laurier. If anything, this kind of thing would serve the inner/outter suburbs much better than a reagular route.