Grand River Transit

[MidTowner]

I have issues with the "less viable" part of your statement. For example, as rangersfan related, I have a big issue with making cars less viable for someone whose trip in a car is 15min while on a bus is 1hr10min.  Apart from being a hassle to rangersfan personally, this is also bad for society in terms of productivity.

I too would like more people to use public transit, which is why I've been a strong proponent of fast frequent buses on the main routes. This is the type of transit that makes people voluntarily surrender their cars.

We’ve spent several generations now subsidizing automobiles over any other form of transportation. It’s not “forcing people out of their cars” or making them “surrender their cars” to reduce some of those subsidies.

Fast frequent transit is one thing. Your example of the 200’s service is a good one. Students take it because it has good service, but also because they have other incentives to choose transit over cars: for one, parking is expensive on campus. Check out the 200 this week: it’s practically empty. It has the same frequent service, is even faster with reduced ridership, but there are relatively few riders who aren’t students. Those people work in places (even our downtowns) where they don’t pay the costs of their parking, so they’re not attracted to transit at almost any service level.

In this region, mass transit probably can’t compete with the automobile on speed, or probably comfort. It is a lot cheaper, but things are organized to hide the true costs of driving from drivers. Anything we can do to show people the full cost of driving is a step in the right direction.