GO Transit

[danbrotherston]

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"

Overall I agree that park and ride is very status quo focussed and not really actually an efficient use of money---but what is, when it comes to cars?

Commuter rail makes me think of Paris's RER. And indeed, they have "parcs relais" which seem to be park and ride, though only on the furthest-out stations: https://www.transilien.com/fr/page-depla...rcs-relais

Wellington, NZ does have commuter rail, as does Auckland. Wellington's rail stations come with parking lots.

It's my impression that some places are trying to build in a downtown after the fact like the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre. I really don't want to think about Vaughan though.

But when we have greenfield here we all too often build fiascoes like the Boardwalk. Ugh.

Lol...Australia and New Zealand are just part of North America the same way Montreal and Quebec are part of Europe. 🤣

To be fair, my experience is not that broad, and really there is lots of diversity in the world, things are not as absolute as we like, but I think these are general trends.

That said, I completely agree, as I said in my first message, I'm unlikely to convince anyone here, and I certainly have zero influence over Metrolinx or GO, they're going to do as they are planning to do I'm sure. But even if they decided they wanted to do better, even if they had politicians and planners on board to do something better, I would still not expect it to be truly revolutionary, there is just so much inertia in the system. But I think there's still value in challenging the status quo, because even the idea that we should be changing things fundamentally can shift the overton window. One person cannot change the direction, but neither can zero people. One step at a time. Maybe someone makes enough noise that they build a nice station square that makes access just a little nicer than a sea of parking. Maybe next time they do as ijmorlan suggests and builds only half the station facing parking.

But to me, the real shame is that there are not that many opportunities to build a greenfield train station like this, and certainly for the KW & Guelph communities, probably only one.