08-26-2020, 04:36 PM
(08-26-2020, 12:49 PM)jeffster Wrote: I look at my own neighbourhood, we lost our transit due to the LRT (trying to save money). Closest stop is a 5 - 15 minute walk, depending on where you live. That past 4 summers though, due to construction, the GRT has been re-routed. So it’s not even close for anyone. I wanted my son to take the bus to his high school, since he didn’t like the walk (exactly 3,180 m, just 20 meters short of school bussing), but we realized that between mid-April and mid-December, there is no service. This affect the entire area. And we’re not the only neighbourhood having these sorts of problems.
For transit to be good for people, it needs to have consistent service. It needs to be quick. We need to be able to get to our “places” (be it work, doctors appointments, etc) in a timely fashion. For the majority, this isn’t the case. This is especially true for those with families. How much time does one want to spend outside the home, going to and from work, and other places, when they have a family to take care of. The majority of people would rather spend 15 minutes in their car getting to and from work, for example, rather than 90 minutes on a bus, both ways.
Transit also needs to be reliable. Currently, it is not. It also needs to be 100% safe for the user, and it is not. And when things like a pandemic come up, we can’t rely on transit. When strikes occurs (like this did last year), we can’t rely on transit.
Personally, for a young, healthy high school student, 3 km is a quick bicycle ride (from April to December) or a not-too-onerous walk. And 10 minutes' walk to a bus stop is not far. But that's just my opinion. When I was young, we walked 20 km to school, barefoot, in a blizzard every day, uphill in both directions ...
Why do you say transit is not reliable and not safe? I don't think we should use a once-in-100 years pandemic as a criterion for reliability.