GGH Transportation and Growth Plan

[ijmorlan]

It's still true, though, that transit trips are basically always slower than car trips in many places. Certainly almost everywhere in North America, specifically including Montreal. Not that we shouldn't have more frequency. We absolutely should. But it doesn't make transit faster than cars, even if it does make transit faster.

This is true but the original point was that reducing headways would improve transit and make it more attractive, not that it would suddenly make transit faster than cars in every situation.

Also, remember that the investment in roads required to maintain car speed is enormous, and has poor economies of scale. Once a train system is in place, it can expand to carry a huge number of people without building more tracks, but a road keeps needing more lanes in order to maintain its speed with many people.

This is why busy downtowns are one place where transit often is faster than driving. Any trip that parallels the subway in Toronto is unlikely to be faster by car during rush hour! In a quite backwater like KW, there isn’t much traffic (regardless of what people might say), so most roads run pretty smoothly most of the time even without enormous numbers of lanes.