02-17-2016, 11:11 AM
(02-17-2016, 10:54 AM)BuildingScout Wrote: Stop trying to force people out of their cars which only makes them into enemies of public transit and instead provide reliable, comfortable transit and people will choose it as an alternative to their first or second car. We have seen this at the University of Waterloo, where increase in demand for student parking has been well below student population growth ever since the iXpress came to town.
I don’t see anything wrong with saying that we collectively should have the goal of lower car usage and higher transit and that the way to do that is to make transit a more viable option, and car usage a less viable option. The most radical thing that’s been mentioned here is for employers to stop incentivizing driving by providing parking the cost of which is hidden to the employee- that’s hardly “forcing” people out of their cars.
Most adults in our Region own a car. When those significant sunk costs and fixed costs are already incurred, the incremental cost of driving those cars are really low- no charge to use any of our roads; no charge to use the vast majority of our parking; heavy subsidies to roads not seen or paid by the car user. Transit is not competing on a level playing field, and as soon as a specific subsidy to car use is brought up, suddenly people are being “forced out of their cars.”