Transit Woes and Transit Goes
My post herein of Wednesday, June 11th, called "Fueling the Madness," has got quite a nice debate going, with 12 comments to date.
A great follow-up is today's Sun column by Bob Ransford titled, "Not All Transit makes Sense."
Ransford argues for grade-level trams. He is right.
Read it and be glad that someone in the media is saying what must be said.
Pictured above is Dublin's terric LUAS system.
4 comments:
The extra cost of owning a home in Vancouver wipes out any savings from not owning a vehicle.
A mortgage for $100,000 at 6 per cent would be about $7500, the cost of owning a new small car.
Moving to Surrey could save hundreds of thousands.
Moving to the city to save on gas is not likely to be an advantage.
But then you're in Surrey...
At-grade LRT/tram has proven to attract more 'new' ridership than underground or elevated transit systems - why?
Grade separated transit systems are inconvenient and convenience is the number 1 item that transit customers want!
Who buys SkyTrain? - No one.
Who buys LRT/trams - just about everyone.
Want more info on LRT, streetcars, or trams go to the Light Rail Transit Associations website @ www.lrta.org
TPTB in this province appear to doing anything in their power to keep the public right of ways for cars alone, despite the historic dominance of streetcars in BC history. Vancouver, Victoria, Nelson, all had decent systems (even in ca 1900 for God sakes) employing some of the first fully electric systems on earth. As mentioned, these systems provided easy "hop on hop off" convenience where ever the lines went, and served to form nicely compact communities excellent for the pedestrian. On the other hand, grade-separated Skytrain to me is all about keeping the streets for cars and cars alone, and this line of thinking spills over to pedestrians and cyclists as well, and explains the God-awful ped and cyclist environment in pretty much any place in the lower mainland that doesn't have the benefit of its original streetcar-oriented design.
If I recall correctly, the original streetcars both here and elsewhere were privately run enterprises. Perhaps it's time for municipal governments to start auctioning off the rights to certain streets in return for private companies getting to keep their fares. Fast track the permit process, and watch the LRT tracks fly into city pavement in 1/4 the time it takes to build concrete behemoth guideways that provide ZERO human-scaled neighbourhoods. That would certainly force Translink to sit up and take notice, and perhaps even get them to think about providing some, nay ANY, type of ped oriented LRT service in Metro Van.
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