Don’t worry, just a little bump - $70 is just around the corner. Short traders just keep making those margin calls, mortgage the house if you have to. Fortunes await you! PO is for pansies and doomers. At $70 short some more ..... it is going back to $22 .... the world is awash with oil ........ reality has nothing to do with it, its all in those charts!!!!!!!!!!
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 9:57 am Post subject: The Public Mass Transit Thread (merged)
There seems to be so many energy consumption initiatives regarding the personal car, and livewise posts here. It seems like most of North America has forgotten public transit. The leverage of having a group of 30-50 people in one vehicle is the most dramatic possible reducitn in fuel used. Most people going to the burbs ahve left
As my own protest against high gas prices and to help the environment in the usually polluted summer, I started taking the bus to work (15 km.) the last month. Its not perfect, but its not so bad either. It takes me about 20 more minutes each way, 45 minutes vs. 25 minutes by car, but most of that is walking five more minutes from work to the bus stop and seven minutes from the bus stop to my home. But, that is good exercise, so its okay. I also get to "smell the roses along the way", as they say.
I am seriously thinking of sticking with the bus, and getting rid of one of our cars. Droppingone car can save big bucks in insurance, ownership costs and maintenance. Most of my co-workers think I've gone off the deep end, they wouldn't want to be seen dead on a bus.
Our suburban city, outside Toronto has a population of 620,000 and only 46,000 avail themselves of public transit. In Toronto its about half the people using transit, 1 million ridersip out of 2.2 million folks. Apparently, back before WW2, most people in Toronto did not even own a car! So, a city can get by without personal cars.
I think our city is like a lot of suburbs in North America, but it has put some effort into transit and on arterial routes, buses run every 8 - 12 minutes in rush hours. Most suburbs in Canada are worse for mass transit. Just why is it that suburbs have been left high and dry for convenient mass transit? To match Toronto, we should have about seven times the ridership in our city.
I think in the long run, we'll have to switch to transit, both due to fuel shortage and the fact that the roads are a congested mess. But, I see that transit has a real stigma to it, like its only for poor people.
Are there any suburbs in North America, or elsewhere which have very effective and popular transit systems? If only a critical mass of people used the system, it would help the traffic out so much and cars and buses would move more quickly. Buses would be much more frequent and therefore user firendly. But, it needs the critical mass to get things rolling, the classic chicken/egg dilemma.
One thing they have done here to help the transit flow is change the law recently, so other traffic has to yield to buses. That allows them to sneak along right turn lanes and then slide over in front of the regular traffic, and the trip has actually shortened about three or four minutes as of late due to this change. Another thing they are looking at in Toronto, on one major street, is reserving one lane each way for transit, but its rough sledding for this one.
Joined: May 26, 2004 Posts: 309 Location: Ontario, Canada
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 10:41 am Post subject:
The Toronto system is pretty good, but the fleet is aging and the city is always trying to get the Province and Federal government to put their promised $$ into it. Also, many buses tends to get sardined at rush hour.
But yes, the coverage is fairly good and having a subway right in the downtown sure helps. I hear many American cities have truly pathetic public transit. _________________ "Our forces are now closer to the center of Baghdad than most American commuters are to their downtown office."
--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, April 2003
Joined: Jun 26, 2004 Posts: 1189 Location: Madison,Wisconsin
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 10:56 am Post subject:
The problem in america is we never really had great mass transit in most of the later built cities in the first place, and with all the anti gov people running around, mass transit sounds like an infringment s on someone s rights or something.
Joined: Jul 14, 2004 Posts: 386 Location: The Motor City
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 12:15 pm Post subject:
Just try implementing mass transit in Detroit. The auto companies would shut it down. This area is pure urban sprawl.
When Peak Oil hits the fan, are suburbanites generally going to move back into cities to be close to all the resources and to be able to get around more easily?
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 12:57 pm Post subject: Re: Future of mass transit in the suburbs
Denny wrote:
Another thing they are looking at in Toronto, on one major street, is reserving one lane each way for transit, but its rough sledding for this one.
We've got bus lanes quite a lot in the UK, ironically they seem to be in the wrong places, but it helps. It's increadible how little traffic there is when "the school run" (all the chubby little darlings getting driven half a mile to school, bless) isn't happening.
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1416 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 1:43 pm Post subject:
My thoughts on public transit is that you can think of it like a phase shift. like crystaliztion If the conditions are right the supersaturated solution will form crystals arround the seed spontaneously, if the conditions are not right no matter how many seeds you add the crystals will not grow.
If the urban conditions are not right public transit disolves away. This is currently happening here in Ottawa.
I know its not a perfect analogy, but the point is that the key to public transit isn't necessarily better public transit, its making the urban conditions where public transit thrives. Car culture is pretty much incompatible with bus culture. Some cities may find an unexploited niche if they differentiate themselves by creating an urban density that encourages a non-car style of living. I understand Portland is doing something like that.
Denny tell me how you like that 7 minute walk in January.
I've got a 40 minute walk, and it's not bad in January. Heck, sometimes it's better than driving.
I do take the car if the weather is really bad, or if the sidewalks are buried in 6' plowdrifts. But walking in winter is quite pleasant. I prefer it to walking in 90F heat in the summer. At least you don't arrive at the office all sweaty and gross.
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 2:24 pm Post subject: Bus in January
I took the bus sporadically in January. Mostly because my daughter needed our second car sometimes for dance practice after school, and we didn't like her traveling by bus after dark.
Anyway, I usually checked the bus scheudle then to make sure Iwasn't standingout on the corner too long. Its frustrating, because as the morning rush hour goes on, the buses get more and more off schedule. Its not the five minute or seven mkinute walk that is so bad, its waiting ont the corner.
I'd like to see a device that could tie in to the bus location using a GPS sensor and you could check the real expected arrival time at a stop using your stop number. They are halfway there now, you can check on the next bus by calling a number and punching in the stop number, but its all based on the schedule, not on reality.
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 2:29 pm Post subject: RE: Detroit
I have noticed when I have been in Detroit that there is a bus system in the city, but outside the city limits its just cars it seems.
Even in the downtown city, it seems like over 80% of people go by car.
I find even downtown Detroit seems to have wide open spaces, its a strange city, and it doesn't look prosperous, that is for sure. It looks like it used to be something but it was all let go. I think Detroit could really be something with some major investment in revitalizing and renovation. Why don't people there want to spend money renovating homes and stores and the like? Home and business renovation is a huge business in Toronto.
Joined: May 23, 2004 Posts: 276 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 7:24 pm Post subject:
nero wrote:
I know its not a perfect analogy, but the point is that the key to public transit isn't necessarily better public transit, its making the urban conditions where public transit thrives.
So what you're saying is that people will use PT if there are no services but if the urban conditions for the success of hypothetical PT are all met. Is your name Peter Batchelor by any chance? (He's the transport minister down here in Victoria, Australia, and his government's "Melbourne 2030" policy is to do just that. Lots of high density traffic generators, no actual services to serve them)
nero wrote:
Car culture is pretty much incompatible with bus culture.
There is a large amount of overlap.
Toronto for example is very much a car city, those freeways are impressive in an ugly sort of way, but it also has the best PT in North America, and it's well used as a result. However, even with North America's best PT, somewhere between a half and two thirds of trips are still made by car.
Melbourne is already pretty much ready for massive PT upgrades, the grid street pattern that extends way out into the suburbs was mostly planned back in the 1890s, but the various depressions killed off most of the tram network expansion plans prior to the car boom of the 1950s, which allowed land to be released for development before PT extensions were built.
nero wrote:
Some cities may find an unexploited niche if they differentiate themselves by creating an urban density that encourages a non-car style of living. I understand Portland is doing something like that.
I hope you don't mean planning around the mentality that PT is for pooft.. err, gays, and also yuppies, DINKs and SINKs, spending ¼-½ a million to move into new or refurbished shoeboxes in the inner cities, treating suburbia as a vile wall that surrounds yuppiedom and keeps the wildlife from reaching the inner cities, whose transport problems are simply incurable?
Denny wrote:
Anyway, I usually checked the bus scheudle then to make sure Iwasn't standingout on the corner too long. Its frustrating, because as the morning rush hour goes on, the buses get more and more off schedule. Its not the five minute or seven mkinute walk that is so bad, its waiting ont the corner.
I'd like to see a device that could tie in to the bus location using a GPS sensor and you could check the real expected arrival time at a stop using your stop number. They are halfway there now, you can check on the next bus by calling a number and punching in the stop number, but its all based on the schedule, not on reality.
Delays and unreliability go hand in hand with transport in congested cities. The important thing is not to justify poor service by putting in expensive GPS and burst data devices.
The solution is to ensure that the service is frequent enough that you could stand at the stop for under five minutes and catch a bus, tram or train, irrespective of whether that service and the others before and after it are all 2 minutes early, on time, 5 minutes late or 20 minutes late. When vehicles bunch, you add in a few short working vehicles half way along the route or where that route intersects with another congested route, and that bus then cuts in when there's been too long a gap between services.
If the service is frequent, nobody would even read the timetable, hence they wouldn't know or care whether the vehicle is late. Indeed, in those circumstances, you wouldn't even print a full timetable, you'd just blank out 6am-10pm and write "Frequent Service". _________________ The purpose of human life revolves around an endless need to extract ever increasing amounts of carbon out of the ground and then release it into the atmosphere.
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1416 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 11:45 pm Post subject:
MrPC wrote:
So what you're saying is that people will use PT if there are no services but if the urban conditions for the success of hypothetical PT are all met.
Yep, If the conditions are right, a PT system will magically appear, just like your hypothetical city that has no history.
MrPC wrote:
I hope you don't mean planning around the mentality that PT is for pooft.. err, gays, and also yuppies, DINKs and SINKs, spending ¼-½ a million to move into new or refurbished shoeboxes in the inner cities, treating suburbia as a vile wall that surrounds yuppiedom and keeps the wildlife from reaching the inner cities, whose transport problems are simply incurable?
I think I am probably saying that. A PT system will atrophy if it doesn't have the ridership to support very frequent service. I lived in Toronto for a while and enjoyed the street cars and subway. I never new the schedules because it wasn't important when the average wait was 5 minutes. A significant added bonus was that the street was actually pretty vibrant with lots of interesting things to look at and people to watch. In the burbs that 5 minutes is not nearly as interesting. The PT is just one component of a non car culture. Another is walking, and having shops oriented towards the pedestrian traffic. I disagree with the idea that you need to be rich to live in a downtown environment. But you do have to accept living cheek by jowl with your neighbours.
MrPC wrote:
nero wrote:
Car culture is pretty much incompatible with bus culture.
There is a large amount of overlap.
Toronto for example is very much a car city, those freeways are impressive in an ugly sort of way, but it also has the best PT in North America, and it's well used as a result. However, even with North America's best PT, somewhere between a half and two thirds of trips are still made by car.
I haven't lived in Toronto for a decade, but my guess would be that their PT is slowly evaporating due to budget pressures. Any Torontonians out there to give me an update? I do maintain that the two urban environments are not compatible. Sure you can have some cars in a bus friendly environment but once you lose the pedestrian traffic and the affluent shoppers on the streets you lose your pedestrian orientated shops and then everyone needs a car just to go and pick up a loaf of bread from the mega store.
<off topic rant>
I really hate those stores that try to combine a department store with a grocery store. Who shops that way? You could comfortably put a full service grocery store in a tenth of the space, and then it would take aquarter of the time to shop. </off topic rant>
Once you own a car to go pick up the loaf of bread, you might as well first go to work first and pick the loaf up on your way back home.
I may be wrong, and if there are examples of great public transit in low density environments I would love to hear about it.
Joined: May 23, 2004 Posts: 276 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 12:23 am Post subject:
nero wrote:
MrPC wrote:
I hope you don't mean planning around the mentality that PT is for pooft.. err, gays, and also yuppies, DINKs and SINKs, spending ¼-½ a million to move into new or refurbished shoeboxes in the inner cities, treating suburbia as a vile wall that surrounds yuppiedom and keeps the wildlife from reaching the inner cities, whose transport problems are simply incurable?
I think I am probably saying that. A PT system will atrophy if it doesn't have the ridership to support very frequent service.
Depending on whether the public authority has other options for funding it..
nero wrote:
I lived in Toronto for a while and enjoyed the street cars and subway. I never new the schedules because it wasn't important when the average wait was 5 minutes. A significant added bonus was that the street was actually pretty vibrant with lots of interesting things to look at and people to watch. In the burbs that 5 minutes is not nearly as interesting.
That can be fixed in lots of different ways. Make the service in the burbs more frequent. Suggest people listen to their choice of music on headphones (at a considerate volume of course). Install newspaper vending machines at bus stops. Do a bit of selective rezoning of land at intersections where bus stops are appropriately located to cater for passing trade.
nero wrote:
I disagree with the idea that you need to be rich to live in a downtown environment. But you do have to accept living cheek by jowl with your neighbours.
You certainly have to be rich to buy in desirable downtown locations.
Here in Melbourne, you can't even get a look in at the high density Docklands developments for under AUD300k. It's slightly more expensive if you want a slightly larger terrace or similar in other desirable and accessible locations.
Meanwhile, there are three bedsit flats up for rent in my building, 4km from the GPO, with Princes Park basically across the road, and a tram every 6 minutes about 100 metres up the road, for AUD100/wk.
nero wrote:
I haven't lived in Toronto for a decade, but my guess would be that their PT is slowly evaporating due to budget pressures.
It has gone downhill, but it is still a long way above any other North American city.
nero wrote:
I do maintain that the two urban environments are not compatible. Sure you can have some cars in a bus friendly environment but once you lose the pedestrian traffic and the affluent shoppers on the streets you lose your pedestrian orientated shops and then everyone needs a car just to go and pick up a loaf of bread from the mega store.
I agree that it is important to move in that direction, however that should not be used as an excuse to deny provision of useful services to areas that have not been demolished and rebuilt to your specifications.
nero wrote:
I may be wrong, and if there are examples of great public transit in low density environments I would love to hear about it.
Define great. Is Toronto's TTC great? Atlanta's MARTA? Los Angeles County's MTA? Perth's TransPerth? Melbourne's Met? _________________ The purpose of human life revolves around an endless need to extract ever increasing amounts of carbon out of the ground and then release it into the atmosphere.
Joined: May 22, 2004 Posts: 1416 Location: Ottawa, Ontario
Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 1:48 am Post subject:
MrPC wrote:
nero wrote:
I think I am probably saying that. A PT system will atrophy if it doesn't have the ridership to support very frequent service.
Depending on whether the public authority has other options for funding it.
Well either political capital or monitary capital has to be found. If it isn't perceived as a valuable service by voters, they won't support it with their tax dollars. If only a small minority(or alternately only poor people who tend not to vote) use the system it is in danger.
MrPC wrote:
You certainly have to be rich to buy in desirable downtown locations.
Here in Melbourne, you can't even get a look in at the high density Docklands developments for under AUD300k. It's slightly more expensive if you want a slightly larger terrace or similar in other desirable and accessible locations.
Meanwhile, there are three bedsit flats up for rent in my building, 4km from the GPO, with Princes Park basically across the road, and a tram every 6 minutes about 100 metres up the road, for AUD100/wk.
Sounds like a nice place, and almost in walking distance of downtown. What is your neighbourhood like? When was it built up?
I think the key point is downtown. You could have dense residential areas with local shopping and good PT in neighbourhoods that aren't right downtown.
MrPC wrote:
I agree that it is important to move in that direction, however that should not be used as an excuse to deny provision of useful services to areas that have not been demolished and rebuilt to your specifications.
Politics is all about choices, and when service is allocated, it should be concentrated in the areas where a pedestrian friendly non-car sentric culture could thrive. And I do think that politicians should encourage public transit and try to grow it. It sounds like your politician is doing a similar job to ours here in Ottawa. There was a big budget deficit this year that was largely plugged by a cut to the subsidy to the PT. Since which roots were on the block, wasn't specified at budget time there was no constituency except for the green nuts lobbying for the PT budget.
Now that its too late we are finding out what a few million from the PT budget means in actual loss of service. It isn't pretty.
Worst of all now some of the politicians think they deserve a 43% pay raise cause of all the hard work they put in.
Joined: May 21, 2004 Posts: 158 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 4:03 am Post subject:
nero wrote:
I never new the schedules because it wasn't important when the average wait was 5 minutes. A significant added bonus was that the street was actually pretty vibrant with lots of interesting things to look at and people to watch. In the burbs that 5 minutes is not nearly as interesting.
I disagree with the idea that you need to be rich to live in a downtown environment. But you do have to accept living cheek by jowl with your neighbours.
I do maintain that the two urban environments are not compatible.
I may be wrong, and if there are examples of great public transit in low density environments I would love to hear about it.
I think the 5 minutes is the key issue, since PT use is very high in Toronto's boring, nondescript, low-density middle suburbs.
And emphatically you do not have to have high densities to provide high-quality PT. Toronto has the best public transport in the English-speaking world, but has low to moderate population density and high car ownership. Bangkok and Jakarta, and most of Italy, have high urban densities and low car ownership, but its roads are gridlocked with traffic due to poor PT.
There is a whole book on this - Mees (2000), A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City. Have a read.
Joined: May 23, 2004 Posts: 276 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 7:06 am Post subject:
nero wrote:
Well either political capital or monitary capital has to be found. If it isn't perceived as a valuable service by voters, they won't support it with their tax dollars. If only a small minority(or alternately only poor people who tend not to vote) use the system it is in danger.
Depends how much say voters have.. Keep in mind that when there are only two parties with a serious hope of forming government, both with the same policies more or less, they tend not to give a damn about what the voters actually want.
Public dollars are therefore spent on things the public doesn't want but ought to have.
nero wrote:
MrPC wrote:
You certainly have to be rich to buy in desirable downtown locations.
Here in Melbourne, you can't even get a look in at the high density Docklands developments for under AUD300k. It's slightly more expensive if you want a slightly larger terrace or similar in other desirable and accessible locations.
Meanwhile, there are three bedsit flats up for rent in my building, 4km from the GPO, with Princes Park basically across the road, and a tram every 6 minutes about 100 metres up the road, for AUD100/wk.
Sounds like a nice place, and almost in walking distance of downtown. What is your neighbourhood like? When was it built up?
Initially the 1870s (I can see an AD1872 on a building across the road if I look out my side window). There were victorian era duplexes/semi detatched houses, many of which were demolished in the early 70s to put up two or three motor inns with pokey rooms, some flats, and some bedsitters. Absolutely no design sense went into the new buildings, as they went up right as government and council were only beginning to toy with the whole urban renewal thing. They failed dismally, but very little actual harm has come of it, and it does help keep the rents down and the real yuppies away. Heck, a homeless couple were sheltering from the rain in my parking bay when I went downstairs a few hours ago on my way to see a pre-release screening of Fahrenheit 911. Last time that happened was about 9 months ago. No big deal.
Though I was thinking on the way that if they were there when I got back, I might point out that there are three empty flats available for rent in the building. However, I did just check and found out that 23 is no longer on the website that I usually keep an eye on, which only leaves two. Tis still enough.
I think the key point is downtown. You could have dense residential areas with local shopping and good PT in neighbourhoods that aren't right downtown.
You could, but at least in this part of the world, you simply don't. Amenity gets worse, car dependence gets worse, and land values get lower the further out you get from the CBD.
nero wrote:
Politics is all about choices, and when service is allocated, it should be concentrated in the areas where a pedestrian friendly non-car sentric culture could thrive. And I do think that politicians should encourage public transit and try to grow it.
Except that PT isn't a business. You don't grow it with words or public confidence or marketing in the absence of useful services. Microsoft could get away with that, but the ex-Met franchisees sure can't. They have been talking about how much they support PT for five years since being elected, but with only token real investment in new and upgraded services and a massive no strings attached bailout. While they are talking out of their rear ends about how great PT is, patronage is dropping if you adjust for citywide population growth, and if you look at the trains, patronage is dropping in real numbers as well as adjusted numbers.
nero wrote:
Worst of all now some of the politicians think they deserve a 43% pay raise cause of all the hard work they put in.
Small fry. Focus on the real issues and the real expenditure. _________________ The purpose of human life revolves around an endless need to extract ever increasing amounts of carbon out of the ground and then release it into the atmosphere.
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