How high-speed rail would change Ontario and Quebec — if it actually happens
How high-speed rail would change Ontario and Quebec — if it actually happens
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I hate when they compare us to Europe though. Maybe Toronto and Quebec are different since they are older but our cities are generally more sprawled with fewer people then Europe.
Not in the Quebec-Windsor corridor. There's enough people, and the density is high enough for rail to be useful.
The environmental benefits are great and all, but you'll get downtown to downtown faster and cheaper than car or train with high speed rail. Like, get off work in downtown Toronto, eat on the train, and watch a Sens game at 7 at LeBreton Flats, and back home for midnight sort of speed.
That is 100% part of our problems with housing, road maintaince and municipal budgeting. We don't have to sprawl just because we have massive amounts of land, we can also build denser cities, transit oriented develolments, and walkable neighbourhoods.
Cities in Europe have managed to build modern neighbourhoods without sprawl, we could too. We need to stop using the excuse "my country/province is too big for transit" when the majority of people travel within their own metropolitan area on a daily basis.
There's a sense in which cars by their nature produce sprawl. Cars are larger than people, so if I want a building to contain N number of people, I need an empty space nearby that contains 3N of just emptiness waiting for a car, so our buildings can't be too close together. There needs to be that buffer space between them for their cars.
Then people have to get to the parking lots, so we need roads. But if I want N people to be able to get here, I need more than that space between our parking lots for enough cars to be able to reach me. Not to mention left turning lanes and big intersections, and of course long stretches to get past the long parking lots.
So if we don't have space for that in a city, we either have to knock down a bunch of buildings to make room for these things, it we have to expand outwards into the larger empty space outside the city. Which naturally leads to sprawl.
It's amazing to actually do a satellite view of an area, take a screenshot, and then colour in the parts that are actually a building or shop or home, and then colour all the other parts that are road, driveway, parking lot, intersection. It's this foam which sprawls.
It's also worth saying that with cars vs transit the incentives flip. With cars I don't want to make things too far away, but like in my previous comment I have to space things out some, and cars are good at going distances, so it's not too bad for business to sprawl. Also, because I need parking for everyone, density of my building (like a multi-story building) requires an even greater density of parking. But parking garages are expensive, so it's easier for me to build a bunch of single story buildings with big surface parking lots.
On the other hand, with transit and pedestrians distances are much more significant. The goal now is to try and get as many things as possible to where the people already are. In this mode, building up is much more sensible because the more housing or offices or businesses you can put on this plot, the less people will have to walk to get there and the closer they are to prominent transit stops, etc. And if I don't need parking, then I'm incentivized to put another building right next to this one to try and hit those same people without them taking more than 20 steps.
Metro Vancouver is by no means on par with Europe, lots of fraser valley sprawl, that is slowly being developed to be higher density, but transit is not too bad. The bus and skytrain are linked so I can travel 45km to work in 1.5 to 2 hours depending on which method I choose, while taking the car to work can be 1.25 to 1.5 hours due to traffic. New skytrain lines are being extended outward also.