Oh sure, 'foreigners' like Europeans and Japanese will invest in and take transit, but have you seen those places? Where were they going to park their cars?
You think they crowd in trains with strangers because they're converted to walkable urbanism or want to save the Earth from climate change? Have you not met a human before? It's not how we operate. We make the right choices when we have no better ones.
You look at any city you can get around in best on foot, and it achieved its density a thousand years ago. If best by transit or bike, a hundred years ago. If best by car, after WWII. It's that simple, and there's nothing going to fix the latter cities but time. Sure, proper planning and investment in the common weal can expedite this, as they do in Europe, and denial and 'culture wars' can delay it, as we do in Toronto, but the outcome is inevitable if a city lasts a few hundred years, it gets better transit than driving. Toronto may be a special case: transit, driving, walking and cycling all suck presently.
What I've just written came to me on a Tokyo train this morning, smelling 'salaryman' farts and halitosis. I was only there because I did not have a better option. If there was a shower at work, I'd rather cycle the 25km each way, every day. If I had the money to keep a car in Tokyo, I would, rather than crowd in with strangers who shower evenings, not mornings*. If I had no children to remain alive for, I'd have a motorbike. The only way to get people on transit is to make it suck less than driving, and that's not easy:
- it has to be faster, door to door
- it has to be nearly as comfortable as sitting in your own car seat
- it has to be cheap yet good, so not only the poor use it
- it has to be policed, so the dregs of all classes do not make people leave it
- it has to be well ventilated and air-filtered, because strangers stink
- it has to be more reliable than people's cars and traffic
Until you give N.Americans that transit, fuck you and take the train yourself, pundits.
*Yes, I do realise that N.Americans smell worse than Japanese, but there aren't so goddamn many of us.
What I've just written came to me on a Tokyo train this morning, smelling 'salaryman' farts and halitosis. I was only there because I did not have a better option. If there was a shower at work, I'd rather cycle the 25km each way, every day. If I had the money to keep a car in Tokyo, I would, rather than crowd in with strangers who shower evenings, not mornings*. If I had no children to remain alive for, I'd have a motorbike. The only way to get people on transit is to make it suck less than driving, and that's not easy:
- it has to be faster, door to door
- it has to be nearly as comfortable as sitting in your own car seat
- it has to be cheap yet good, so not only the poor use it
- it has to be policed, so the dregs of all classes do not make people leave it
- it has to be well ventilated and air-filtered, because strangers stink
- it has to be more reliable than people's cars and traffic
Until you give N.Americans that transit, fuck you and take the train yourself, pundits.
*Yes, I do realise that N.Americans smell worse than Japanese, but there aren't so goddamn many of us.
Public transport in Melbourne, although shit, is still the main way people commute to work in the CBD. I think it's mainly because parking in the city is very expensive (PT is pretty cheap here esp if you get a yearly ticket) plus annoying to get to - all the roads into the city become bottlenecks and we have trams which make things even worse for drivers.
ReplyDeleteI'd never drive to the city. I'd rather read or do something like that on the overcrowded, smelly train than be sitting in traffic.
Outside the CBD, it's near impossible to get convenient public transport.
However, most people drive to the train station and the car parks are always overflowing. I don't blame them though because bus services to the station are so infrequent and not synced to the train services at all. Who wants to get the train home and then wait 30 mins for a bus? No one seems to think about improving bus services instead of expanding car parking.
We do have good bike facilities though. A lot of offices have showers and we have a "bike pod" now in the CBD with showers etc.
Canada is bullshit for bike facilities, and the lethality of our witless drivers. Québec is better, but Québec is always better. Just why didn't I learn French in school or five years in Montréal? Oh... I was a dumb fucking kid.
ReplyDeleteI will take one issue with your post, because it applies to streetcars in Toronto also, and we hear similar wording. "We have trams which make things even worse for drivers." If a tram has a hundred people on it, which they do in Toronto, and some single-occupant cars are in the traffic mix, just who is blocking whom?
Hey I'm pro trams blocking drivers. Anything to make it harder for them. I found out it is a $50 fine for impeding trams here and that's bullshit. It should be more like $500 with the tram driver able to take your licence plate.
DeleteWhen you threw halitosis into your description of what riding on mass transit is like for the Tokyo folk... I almost yakked. Gosh, the city life sounds truly awful.
ReplyDeleteCrowds really freak me out. I can't imagine being in a large city for any longer than maybe 48 hours, tops.
Would you ever consider living in B.C.? For some reason, I've got this imagine that they are more bike-friendly over there.
I have an ambivalency to cities. I am claustrophobic of small spaces, and of close quarters with people, yet I am driven mad by boredom if there is not a feast of diversions, even if I do not most often make use of them. Toronto manages to be the worst of both.
ReplyDeleteB.C.? I did plan to move there once, but let me tell you a few things about the myth of Vancouver (it barely qualifies, and there are no other cities in B.C.). Although:
"Toronto makes Sunday in a Scotch village seem like a hashish dream."
Imagine a city with the same people, but a third as many, and two-thirds less to do. Then, although it is a city in the middle of fjord-like bays surrounded by mountains and lit by the sun in the summer, it rains all winter. Really, it does. Winter rain. As I told a Brit at work:
"Vancouver? Imagine the coldest most miserable rainy winter day back home, and live in that for seven months."
And all the adrenaline sports? Rents are 150% of Toronto, owning 200%; average wages maybe 75%. How much money will you have left to go skiing with then?
I am stuck in Toronto as I am locked into an Ontario teachers' pension plan, and the place I am at on the pay-scale. Had I made other and wise choices, Montréal or Japan long term, although there are issues with each. Japan needn't be Tokyo, but not smaller than Yokohama, not far from Chubu mountains, not even hotter than Tokyo...
I live in one of those latter cities you speak of.... cars. :( If our transportation system was even just a tad better I would rather save myself the money I spend on gas, car maintenance and insurance and use the bus. Unfortunately the side of town I work and live on is right at the border and the main bus routes are towards the center of town.
ReplyDeleteBike riding would be an option for IF I didn't have to compete with farm equipment, cross traffic and no bike lane for part of my stretch home. I would end up a road pancake or else have to go several miles out of my way to avoid the death trap that is a straight shot home.
Thought I would now volunteer to take the bus, it is also rare for it to be crowded with the stink of humans except for the occasional homeless person.
"Yes, I do realise that N.Americans smell worse than Japanese"
ReplyDeleteI think the evening baths and lack of enthusiasm about deoderant negates any truth to that statement. I only got on the bus filled with tourists (Japanese) coming back from Pearl Harbor once...that was enough. A bus full of sweaty Japanese was an offense to the sinuses I will never forget.
Fair enough. I should have said that if they bathed in the morning and wore deodorant...
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