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London Rapid Transit (In-Design)

Building an entirely new subway line through downtown demonstrates that TTC has poor transit?

You dodge so many questions, while making your claims. Where are these non-existent ghettos? Which city in Canada (or USA) has much better transit? How is Vancouver a ghetto issue, rather than a homeless issue?

It is not a priority, hence the fact that the downtown U's relief has been put to the back burner for so long, and even now, there is lots of posturing on it, and still no shovels in the ground shows how bad the transit is, not how good it is.

Wrong. A lot of Europe was even rebuilt as car centric. Go read up on the ideas of Le Corbusier. Everybody knows all about bike friendly Amsterdam. It wasn't always that way. It was so car friendly that pedestrian deaths soared. And when children started getting run over, there was a backlash. It took them nearly three decades to get to where they are. But the key is to at least start down that road. And here you get to see the history in Amsterdam that would have made it like a car dependent American city:


Here is a great video on Rotterdam to explain how a city built for cars can get better:


I will never understand why despite all evidence, folks like you insist that no change is possible. Do you actually like London being the crapfest it is? I don't. I see so much potential in that city. And it breaks my heart, how they squander it. I would love to retire there if they actually built a decent urban core.

Change is always possible, but sometimes it gets halted. Brampton and Hamilton are proof of that,. London will come around, eventually.

Not London.....

...yet.... Things can change with an election. This year, in 2022, we are having a provincial and municipal election. Just like with Hamilton, London could vote for a protransit council.

Anywhere with a Farhi sign.

They are not abandoned. They may not be well up kept, but they are not abandoned.
 
Show me an area of London that has a decent amount of abandoned buildings or houses.
The area immediately next to the VIA station.
There are 2 sides of transit that if they exist, then it is good.
One is how frequent it is. The other is whether it can fit you when it arrives. Having to wait for the next bus/subway/streetcar because this one is full is not a sign of good transit. It is a sign of transit that is well used.

Line 1 for example. At Bloor, during the commute, you will not get on the next subway. King Streetcar is also the same issue.
Which is why we're building a ton of RER lines, a new subway line, doubling the frequency of the subway, massively expanding Bloor-Yonge station, giving the King Streetcar mostly its own ROW, and quadrupling our Streetcar fleet. Nobody is claiming transit in Toronto is PERFECT, but great would definitely be apt.

A major point to mention is also what a city is doing to solve its issues, because even the best transit cities have issues that need solving. Are you the TTC that is doing a ton of improvement to make the transit system better and to fix many of its problems, or are you SEPTA who refuses to recognize that its the 21st century, and that maybe running 60 year old trains on most of the network is probably not the best thing to be doing.
Steeles has buses coming in under 5 minutes, but can you get on one? It is great that it comes every 2 minutes, but if 10 guess pass you buy, it isn't good at all.
Is this something you can confirm happens? There was a period of time where I used the Finch East bus every day during rush hours, I can't say I ever had to have a bus skip by. Actually, after living in Toronto for 20 years, I can't say I ever saw a situation where there was more than 1 maybe 2 busses in a row that passed by a stop due to being full, let alone 10.
The point of transit isn't about seeing it go by, but it being able to take you where you are going.
You know there's more to transit than whether or not its at its most useful at a particular time frame
The citizens of London have voted for their representatives. Those representative are the ones making the decisions. So, the citizens are voting for the people who will put in place things that they feel they want in their city. If the citizens won't use transit, then they aren't likely going to vote for protransit representatives.
Says a lot about the citizens of London - which is kind of the point of this whole conversation to begin with. The state of London is a disaster that is caused by the people of London itself.
Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
Huh?
You are right. It has to do with Who Killed Roger Rabbit.
HUH?
 
The area immediately next to the VIA station.

Which is why we're building a ton of RER lines, a new subway line, doubling the frequency of the subway, massively expanding Bloor-Yonge station, giving the King Streetcar mostly its own ROW, and quadrupling our Streetcar fleet. Nobody is claiming transit in Toronto is PERFECT, but great would definitely be apt.

A major point to mention is also what a city is doing to solve its issues, because even the best transit cities have issues that need solving. Are you the TTC that is doing a ton of improvement to make the transit system better and to fix many of its problems, or are you SEPTA who refuses to recognize that its the 21st century, and that maybe running 60 year old trains on most of the network is probably not the best thing to be doing.

Is this something you can confirm happens? There was a period of time where I used the Finch East bus every day during rush hours, I can't say I ever had to have a bus skip by. Actually, after living in Toronto for 20 years, I can't say I ever saw a situation where there was more than 1 maybe 2 busses in a row that passed by a stop due to being full, let alone 10.

You know there's more to transit than whether or not its at its most useful at a particular time frame

Says a lot about the citizens of London - which is kind of the point of this whole conversation to begin with. The state of London is a disaster that is caused by the people of London itself.

Huh?

HUH?

Take some time and research Who Killed Roger Rabbit. Then everything I have been saying will make perfect sense. You will understand why London does not have it's old streetcar line. You will understand why the major employers for a long time were Ford and GM. You will understand why London is so anti transit.

Answer these questions:
What is Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
How does it pertain to London Ontario?
 
Take some time and research Who Killed Roger Rabbit. Then everything I have been saying will make perfect sense. You will understand why London does not have it's old streetcar line. You will understand why the major employers for a long time were Ford and GM. You will understand why London is so anti transit.

Answer these questions:
What is Who Killed Roger Rabbit?
How does it pertain to London Ontario?
You know, if you have to explain a joke - let alone tell the other person to do research on a joke, its no longer funny.
 
And in the 1940s, London was ripping up their streetcar lines. Now, that needs to be reversed. The transit renaissance has been happening for about 15 years - since around 2008 as make work projects to stimulate the economy after the great recession. Now, the ball is rolling that more places are jumping on the movement.

The last streetcar in London operated in 1940; it didn’t even last through the Second World War. But it was a small and an especially antiquated network, more so than Kitchener or Hamilton, which held on to their streetcars a few more years.

With a system as small as as creaky as London’s was in the late 1930s, buses would have been an improvement. There wasn’t a conspiracy here to destroy transit.

The National City Lines conspiracy in the US wasn’t really about destroying transit either: it was about cornering the market for buses, tires, and fuel that the new postwar bus fleets were going to need by buying up old privately-owned transit services and merely accelerating the replacement of streetcars with new buses, mostly in smaller cities.

What destroyed transit was suburbanization fed by government programs like mortgage insurance and homebuyer incentives, highway construction, as well as bank redlining of inner city neighbourhoods and industry moving to new greenfield plants outside the city.
 
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You know, if you have to explain a joke - let alone tell the other person to do research on a joke, its no longer funny.

It isn't a joke, it is a serious thing that saw legal action on it.

The last streetcar in London operated in 1940; it didn’t even last through the Second World War. But it was a small and an especially antiquated network, more so than Kitchener or Hamilton, which held on to their streetcars a few more years.

With a system as small as as creaky as London’s was in the late 1930s, buses would have been an improvement. There wasn’t a conspiracy here to destroy transit.

Much better to rip it up than to do the maintenance that was lacking due to the war effort.
 
It is not a priority, hence the fact that the downtown U's relief has been put to the back burner for so long, and even now, there is lots of posturing on it, and still no shovels in the ground shows how bad the transit is, not how good it is.
This sounds like the absurd arguments you get from those that hate Toronto, both saying no one wants to live there, while complaining about the high house prices, driven by a lot of demand. It's one spot in a great big city.

You still fail to answer the questions about where these mythical ghettos are. Who has better transit? All have issues here and there.
 
This sounds like the absurd arguments you get from those that hate Toronto, both saying no one wants to live there, while complaining about the high house prices, driven by a lot of demand. It's one spot in a great big city.

You still fail to answer the questions about where these mythical ghettos are. Who has better transit? All have issues here and there.
The people who live outside of the GTA tend to hate Toronto and all it represents. So, yes the argument is absurd, but if you understand the people of the places that is saying it, it makes perfect, absurd sense. I'd argue the city with the worst ghetto in Canada has the best local transit.
 
The guy that does the "not just bikes" series is a true jackass.

He is from London and uses it as his favorite whipping boy. He somehow thinks it's fair to compare a 1000 year old European capitol city of 3 million to a NA one of only 200 years that is one-fifth the size. He shows London as a decaying monster and he always includes a pic of his favorite corner of suburban Wonderland & Oxford and then shows his utopian downtown Amsterdam neighbourhood as a comparison.

Of course he never shows the vibrant areas of downtown London, the Market, Richmond Row, Wortley Village, or the city's beautiful inner city streets and neighbourhoods of gorgeous old historic Victorians and Edwardians on leafy streets beside all the parks the city enjoys including probably Canada's most beautiful and vibrant downtown park, Victoria, No shots of the Thames River and all the parkland that stretches into all areas of the city or the beautiful institutional buildings downtown or at Western which is one of Canada's most scenic campuses. Conversely, he never shows us the other side of Amsterdam with it's thousands of drug addicted homeless and it's concrete bunker suburban ethnic ghettos.

London needs to progress and it is making solid steps to do so and has many challenges but that does not change the fact that it is one of Canada's most pleasant, likeable, attractive, safe, green, and livable cities.
 
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The people who live outside of the GTA tend to hate Toronto and all it represents. So, yes the argument is absurd, but if you understand the people of the places that is saying it, it makes perfect, absurd sense. I'd argue the city with the worst ghetto in Canada has the best local transit.
Which people?

Which city in Canada has a ghetto? I thought even the Halifax one was long gone.
 
The guy that does the "not just bikes" series is a true jackass.

He is from London and uses it as his favorite whipping boy. He somehow thinks it's fair to compare a 1000 year old European capitol city of 3 million to a NA one of only 200 years that is one-fifth the size. He shows London as a decaying monster and he always includes a pic of his favorite corner of suburban Wonderland & Oxford and then shows his utopian downtown Amsterdam neighbourhood as a comparison.

Awwww. Triggered much? Listen to his interviews. He was an engineer who has lived in dozens of cities around the world. And sleeping in Hong Kong and waking up in Dallas, with the contrast the comes with it, is what formed his opinion. He has also talked about how him and his wife moved back to Toronto. His wife was on the board of Cycle TO. They tried to be the change they wanted to see. How much of that have you done?

His criticism is spot on. Too bad you can't get past your butthurt to see it. I'm so glad there's somebody calling out all the usual Canadian excuses for building crap infrastructure. And it's telling that you have to fall back to the usual excuses.

Here's a great video he made about winter cycling in a Finnish town that has similar population density to London. You still want to argue only thousand year old towns have a great infrastructure? This is a town that is substantially suburbanized and mostly newly built.

If you ever wonder why we don't build better infrastructure in this country, look in the mirror. Way too many people ready to make excuses and accept crap. It's like we're a country of C grade students.
 
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London needs to progress and it is making solid steps to do so and has many challenges but that does not change the fact that it is one of Canada's most pleasant, likeable, attractive, safe, green, and livable cities.

Must be why you and most other younger people I know from that city don't live there anymore.....
 
The guy that does the "not just bikes" series is a true jackass.

He is from London and uses it as his favorite whipping boy. He somehow thinks it's fair to compare a 1000 year old European capitol city of 3 million to a NA one of only 200 years that is one-fifth the size. He shows London as a decaying monster and he always includes a pic of his favorite corner of suburban Wonderland & Oxford and then shows his utopian downtown Amsterdam neighbourhood as a comparison.

Of course he never shows the vibrant areas of downtown London, the Market, Richmond Row, Wortley Village, or the city's beautiful inner city streets and neighbourhoods of gorgeous old historic Victorians and Edwardians on leafy streets beside all the parks the city enjoys including probably Canada's most beautiful and vibrant downtown park, Victoria, No shots of the Thames River and all the parkland that stretches into all areas of the city or the beautiful institutional buildings downtown or at Western which is one of Canada's most scenic campuses. Conversely, he never shows us the other side of Amsterdam with it's thousands of drug addicted homeless and it's concrete bunker suburban ethnic ghettos.

London needs to progress and it is making solid steps to do so and has many challenges but that does not change the fact that it is one of Canada's most pleasant, likeable, attractive, safe, green, and livable cities.
I would be lying if I said I didn't have problems with NJB (in fact I have MANY problems with him as a content creator) however one thing I can agree with him on is that London is dank and depressing.
 

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