I’m not sure that I buy the guy’s premise that a lack of roads cause people to drive less. Yes, it’s a helpful combatant to driving out of laziness, but some people need/want to drive and they always will.
Edmonton and Calgary have a ton of roads and ridiculous sprawl, and I’ve never seen the roads super-busy (except for during construction or Highway 1 (16 Ave) in Calgary). Vancouver, on the other hand, has way less road, less cars, smaller cars, narrower lanes, and less parking but during daylight hours driving is hell. However, in the evenings the roads are practically empty.
What are your thoughts?
Someone’s never driven downtown Calgary at rush hour.
That being said, I think that the sprawl and cars are a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. There’s a need for cars in Calgary because of the sprawl, and they keep sprawling out, reasoning that people can drive into the city, and without being well-versed in the history of the thing, I’m not sure which came first. I would drive less if I could, but even driving to the train station, I still have two trains and a bus and at least an hour, assuming all connections work out correctly, before I can get to work (which, incidentally, speaks to the poor transit design in Calgary; yes, let’s build the only east-west leg of the LRT through the busiest part of the fucking city and make it stop at every other traffic light, assclowns).
My thinking is, the only real way to get cars off the road is to either move everyone 5-10 km further into the city (good luck with that), or build the train out to the point where it’s actually convenient to get to more than a handful of lucky neighbourhoods and malls using it. I’d also be happier with the train if I could bypass downtown and take a train though the outer reaches of the city to get to the northwest. It’d probably only take about fifteen minutes without all the north-south doubling back and downtown-related bollocks. Maybe once they’re done building all the spokes, they can connect them with a ring track, like a lot of European cities have. Maybe at that point I’ll also sprout wings out my ass and fly, assuming I’m not 70 by the time all these things happen.
Ok, you’re right. Downtown. But only downtown, and only at rush hour. And let me tell you, you cannot compare downtown Calgary/Edmonton and downtown Vancouver during rush hour.
But the bottom line is that cars don’t fill up lanes, and taking lanes away isn’t going to make traffic decrease – it’ll just spread out into a bunch of other routes (aside from the few who will be discouraged enough to just quit).
That much I agree on. If you’re going to chop out roads, at least have the decency to provide real alternatives. Calgary Transit, unless you’re one of the few and proud who lives near a train station, is not a real alternative (and even then, if you’re not going downtown, it’s a monumental pain in the ass).