GO Transit

[danbrotherston]

I'll be blunt, and this is an unpopular opinion. I think new large park and ride facilities on greenfield space is a bad idea.

And I realize that I'm not going to convince anyone here, nor am I even going to be seen at anyone at GO/Metrolinx so this is a conversation for conversations sake, but the fact is, building a large park and ride facility is an investment that benefits a relatively small number of people (say 500-1000, who could possibly would use even a very large parking lot), at the cost of long term maintenance of the status quo--a transit station that will remain permanently and completely inaccessible by all the development that absolutely will happen around it. It is another missed opportunity to change the strategy of development in the province, and a significant loss of housing opportunity in a province with a desperate shortage of housing.

But I fully expect that a P&R facility will be built somewhere around the same time the 7 expressway is also completed, because nothing is changing in the province.

How do other jurisdictions (ie overseas) handle delivering commuters to their regional rail stations without parking garages?  Would Waterloo Region ever be able to increase its transit network to enough capacity to allow regular connections to GO services? In a Region where a car can get a person virtually anywhere is less than 20 minutes, a walk+transit ride would need to be less than 45 minutes to appear competitive.

I would love to see fewer parking garages, but especially for terminals at the end of the line, I don't see how GO can avoid them.  For passengers arriving from points north and west of Kitchener the only way might be to increase GO bus service to places like Stratford, New Hamburg or Elmira.  Extending secondary rail service beyond existing terminals with trains that don't all need to end their inbound trips at Union Station would also be a good route to go, but I don't see that happening soon.

I think commuter rail is a uniquely North American phenomenon. No other country (or at least none I can think of) builds a transit system that is designed to cater only to commute hour drivers. So yes, if the only goal is to do that, then a P&R makes sense. But I don't think that should be the goal here.

As for what other countries do, some do have P&Rs, but they're generally smaller, and as suggested by ijmorlan cover at most half the station area.

For me, the problem with the Breslau station is that this is station that will be surrounded by a moat of parking, and exist for no other reason. Worse, development will almost certainly follow the station and grow around it, but with no plan and a shitty station area, this development will be unplanned, and car focused.

There is an opportunity instead to build a transit focused new complete community around it. How often do we open a new rail transit station? This is precisely what was done in the neighbourhood I live in, they opened a new station, and built a whole community around it.

But there are two big obstacles here. First, nobody has even imagined that you can build a transit community like this in North America. But bigger than that, you'd have to accept that people in KW that WANT to go to Toronto would have a choice: live in the transit focused area, or drive instead. The idea that we should give up on getting people living in a car dependent suburban wasteland sounds wrong, but I think it makes sense. People who live in a car dependent area aren't going to make extensive use of transit. We should instead by providing the opportunity for people to live a car light lifestyle by providing a good experience in such a place.

Like many things, this is about a deeper concept of freedom and choice. E.g., not "I expect to drive wherever I want, even a transit station" the choice should be "what kind of lifestyle do I want to have"