I'm kind of struggling with understanding that article and in particular the difference between local/regional congestion.
The best solution to both is public transit. There are lots of places around the world where there isn't significant local congestion because living w/o a car is much more common and accommodated. Business served by a strong regional and local public transportation network can thrive quite easily without local car congestion. Often removing local congestion entirely (through banning cars, removing parking, encouraging bike/pedestrian friendly alternative etc.) can actually help businesses.
“Local congestion is good for business; it signals the presence of people, money and activity. Regional congestion, by contrast, implies the opposite."
I really don't see how these are opposites. I especially don't see how you're getting lots of "good" local congestion w/o any regional congestion. They're related. Downtown Toronto isn't going to be packed with cars unless those cars are coming from someplace else - and it doesn't really make sense to me that its just coming from local areas. They're mostly coming from places that need to also use regional connections. And nobody is taking regional mass transit into downtown Toronto just to grab a car and drive around the area. If anything more people drive on the regional roads, park somewhere convenient, and then use public transit to get to the 'locally congested' areas.
Looking at Waterloo, it often feels like most of the "local" congestion is just congestion related to the feeding into of 85 and the other main routes into/out of the city.
It also seems to miss that we generally want both regional and local "congestion" at least some of the time because it means we haven't completely overbuilt our infrastructure (not to mention its almost certainly not possible to avoid congestion in a lot of situations).
Am I just missing something?
The best solution to both is public transit. There are lots of places around the world where there isn't significant local congestion because living w/o a car is much more common and accommodated. Business served by a strong regional and local public transportation network can thrive quite easily without local car congestion. Often removing local congestion entirely (through banning cars, removing parking, encouraging bike/pedestrian friendly alternative etc.) can actually help businesses.
“Local congestion is good for business; it signals the presence of people, money and activity. Regional congestion, by contrast, implies the opposite."
I really don't see how these are opposites. I especially don't see how you're getting lots of "good" local congestion w/o any regional congestion. They're related. Downtown Toronto isn't going to be packed with cars unless those cars are coming from someplace else - and it doesn't really make sense to me that its just coming from local areas. They're mostly coming from places that need to also use regional connections. And nobody is taking regional mass transit into downtown Toronto just to grab a car and drive around the area. If anything more people drive on the regional roads, park somewhere convenient, and then use public transit to get to the 'locally congested' areas.
Looking at Waterloo, it often feels like most of the "local" congestion is just congestion related to the feeding into of 85 and the other main routes into/out of the city.
It also seems to miss that we generally want both regional and local "congestion" at least some of the time because it means we haven't completely overbuilt our infrastructure (not to mention its almost certainly not possible to avoid congestion in a lot of situations).
Am I just missing something?