denfromoakvillemilton
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- Apr 30, 2008
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This is false. York is not in special status away from the rest of the 905.The problem with local service (again) is that nobody's going to use it. You could have the same level of service as the TTC, and ridership would barely change. Most people in the "local" areas of York Region have practically no interest in using public transit, and wouldn't have any interest even if you paid them to use YRT. York Region wasn't designed to be transit-friendly (which is impossible to change in existing communities), very few people have any trouble owning one or two cars, and there are hardly any traffic congestion problems to encourage transit use.
"This BRT thing" is being done because these few corridors are the only places where potential ridership growth might justify the cost of transit improvements.
Then this should be the case in the other suburbs as well. It is not.Local trips is where people are least interested in taking transit, because (A) it's when there's less traffic, and (B) they're likely to be doing things like sports and shopping where transit is extremely inconvenient (especially for multi-stop shopping trips). The people who plan transit (i.e. actual experts) are saying the opposite of what you're saying: rush hour is the time when there's a decent return on investing in improvements to some of the local routes.
Yes. The fact that you're resorting to this line makes me think you don't have much to back up your views.
This is exactly the problem - transit is never going to be competitive with driving on speed, convenience, frequency or reliability. Even if there was a bus meeting every train at Go stations (there often is one already), the average wait of 2-3 minutes is more than whatever time it takes to get into/out of the parking lots, and then you lose a lot more time while the bus stops for pickups/dropoffs and winds inefficiently around local roads that were designed to be lightly used and can't be redesigned.
And even if none of what I said is true, all these Go Transit passengers would still be using cars exclusively outside of rush hour.
Agreed. If any of this is true then there is no justification for the the RH extension. In reality, this is not the case.We've been over this at least once before in this thread, but that is utterly absurd. I absolutely acknowledge the car culture in York, but a huge percentage of people would use YRT for many local trips if there was good service. "Hardly any traffic congestion" - have you been to a GO station in York Region during rush hour before? I would bet a huge percentage, >50%, of GO riders at most suburban stations would use local transit exclusively, if it were frequent, reliable, and reasonably quick (keeping in mind a longer trip offsets time getting into parking/looking for a space/leaving the station in the evening, given a good bus loop location/transit priority to bypass entrance/exit congestion).