09-27-2016, 12:10 PM
Dan, I'm going to try to avoid rehashing stuff.
"You're conflating two issues. You claimed that some areas are better to serve with cars. This is true, for very sparse rural areas, there isn't enough demand for transportation to serve with mass transit. Guelph and Kitchener are not sparse rural areas, their medium sized cities."
I don't believe "very sparse rural areas" are the only places where mass transit doesn't make sense. I'd even go so far as saying that there are a lot of areas where mass transportation makes sense for specific use cases (like commuting to/from work) but where it doesn't make sense to build out enough transit to remove the need for cars entirely. And the reality is large portions of medium sized cities fall into this category. Like I said, I lived in NYC and still owned a car because it was necessary for certain things I wanted to do. And it would definitely NOT have been an efficient idea to try to build general mass transit to cover my use cases.
"or if we built nothing, as before, those developments might not get built because people don't want to be stuck on old highway 7. We cannot know,"
These are the kind of statements that lead me to believe you're not actually familiar with the situation we're talking about. Do you have any idea the development that's already happened in the area? It started happening long before the new highway 7 was anywhere close to a reality. We can (And do!) generally know what would happen growth wise in this area. It doesn't take a crystal ball.
"You're conflating two issues. You claimed that some areas are better to serve with cars. This is true, for very sparse rural areas, there isn't enough demand for transportation to serve with mass transit. Guelph and Kitchener are not sparse rural areas, their medium sized cities."
I don't believe "very sparse rural areas" are the only places where mass transit doesn't make sense. I'd even go so far as saying that there are a lot of areas where mass transportation makes sense for specific use cases (like commuting to/from work) but where it doesn't make sense to build out enough transit to remove the need for cars entirely. And the reality is large portions of medium sized cities fall into this category. Like I said, I lived in NYC and still owned a car because it was necessary for certain things I wanted to do. And it would definitely NOT have been an efficient idea to try to build general mass transit to cover my use cases.
"or if we built nothing, as before, those developments might not get built because people don't want to be stuck on old highway 7. We cannot know,"
These are the kind of statements that lead me to believe you're not actually familiar with the situation we're talking about. Do you have any idea the development that's already happened in the area? It started happening long before the new highway 7 was anywhere close to a reality. We can (And do!) generally know what would happen growth wise in this area. It doesn't take a crystal ball.