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Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road
(04-02-2021, 04:19 AM)plam Wrote:
(04-02-2021, 02:27 AM)Bjays93 Wrote: Itll be a nightmare with the hespeler rd bridge and ramps closed for who knows how long. Hespeler road carries a ridiculous amount of traffic, and is the main arterial road in cambridge. Franklin only has a 2 way interchange with the 401, so you are going to have a ridiculous amount of traffic travelling on pinebush and holiday inn drive/Jamison parkway. Franklin and town line will also be affected to an extent by the windening construction. Itll just turn cambridge traffic into a nightmare, because these roads are just not designed for the traffic they're about to take and the lack of multiple easy detour routes means everyone is going the same long way out of their way. 

That said the highway traffic should be fine I'd imagine

Reduced demand is also often a thing. There have been a lot of predictions of traffic-geddon when capacity is removed from highway systems and then not so much when it actually happens.

This happens pretty reliably actually, and yet somehow we are unable to learn it.
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(04-02-2021, 07:03 AM)danbrotherston Wrote:
(04-02-2021, 04:19 AM)plam Wrote: Reduced demand is also often a thing. There have been a lot of predictions of traffic-geddon when capacity is removed from highway systems and then not so much when it actually happens.

This happens pretty reliably actually, and yet somehow we are unable to learn it.

To be fair it violates our intuitive first-order understanding of how the world works. People really need to understand this concept though.
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After decades of roads being provided to their users for free (by taxpayers at large, most of whom are in the driving group, to be sure, so please nobody bring up how roads are not in fact built by fairy elves; but the appreciation drivers give for their free roads is not at all in line with the complaints from taxpayers over the money they have to shell out), enough driving activity is of sufficiently low value that just deciding not to do it at all for a while, knowing that the area is under construction, makes basically no difference to our lives.

It would be different if we actually had to pay at busy times. For one thing, a lot of traffic would probably decide that it actually isn’t absolutely essential to go precisely at rush hour but rather moving the trip to an off peak time would be just fine.
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(04-02-2021, 07:58 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: After decades of roads being provided to their users for free (by taxpayers at large, most of whom are in the driving group, to be sure, so please nobody bring up how roads are not in fact built by fairy elves; but the appreciation drivers give for their free roads is not at all in line with the complaints from taxpayers over the money they have to shell out), enough driving activity is of sufficiently low value that just deciding not to do it at all for a while, knowing that the area is under construction, makes basically no difference to our lives.

It would be different if we actually had to pay at busy times. For one thing, a lot of traffic would probably decide that it actually isn’t absolutely essential to go precisely at rush hour but rather moving the trip to an off peak time would be just fine.

I would point out that mobility is inherently a social good. It improves many things.

But the key I see is that we can enable that same mobility at a far far lower cost. This is what people fear though, they are so unimaginative that they cannot conceive of having the same mobility without driving.
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(04-02-2021, 09:57 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: But the key I see is that we can enable that same mobility at a far far lower cost. This is what people fear though, they are so unimaginative that they cannot conceive of having the same mobility without driving.

No imagination is needed to understand that mobility is not, and never will be, the same without driving. Not even close. I'll give you 3 personal examples:

1) On Sunday I take my mother to her covid-19 shot, finally. She herself is 80, and can't do a lot of walking. Either way, her vaccination will be at The Boardwalk in Waterloo. Problem 1 - we have no local Sunday service in the area, it was cancelled to help pay for the Ion. Problem 2, even if we could get transit (such as taken a later vaccination date), it would be 2 transfers (3 busses), 20 minutes of walking, about about 4 hours of bus travel time. With a car, it's 12 minutes there and 12 minutes back. At the very least, we're saving 4 hours. And likely she couldn't do all the required walking anyway.

2) Say my buddy in Cambridge invites me over to his place after work, in order to go over to a close restaurant from his place. In this case, I can only do this when I have a day shift: Done work at 4:00 -- quickest method of transit gets me home by 4:45. I quickly shower and I am ready to leave by 5. Quickest route to his place gets me there at 7:21. Now, quickest route to the restaurant gets us there at 8:30. Stay for a couple hours, and head back to my place, and I arrive home at 12:20. With a car, I get home a 4:08, leave my place by 4:25, at his place by 4:45, at restaurant by 4:55, leave after two hours, drive him back to his place, 7:05, drive back home, 7:25. That's a 5 hour difference. (For those scenarios, I used the GRT trip planner).

3) Invited to a relatives or friends that are out of town. It's not happening without a car.

Now, if you have suggestions how one can do those above things without a car, I'll listen. But the only thing I can imagine is using a driverless car, and I think that would get expensive quick once it is available.

Cars give a quality of life and options and flexibility and time. Just like in the old times where a horse and buggy would do the same. Hell, with the above cases, a horse and buggy would be quicker every time.

Back to this discussion: do I think we need to widen the road RIGHT NOW? Not really. Between Highway 8 and Hespeler was fine. Between Hespeler and Townline? Probably not. But it's part of their master plan and has been on the books for a long time.
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(04-03-2021, 08:40 PM)jeffster Wrote: No imagination is needed to understand that mobility is not, and never will be, the same without driving. Not even close. I'll give you 3 personal examples:

I think I'd agree with Dan that you have a lack of imagination here. Why? because you don't see to even have thought of the option of giving the money for the 401 widening (and other similar road projects) given over to bettering public transit options so that there wouldn't be the delays you speak of.
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(04-03-2021, 08:40 PM)jeffster Wrote: No imagination is needed to understand that mobility is not, and never will be, the same without driving. Not even close. I'll give you 3 personal examples:

2) Say my buddy in Cambridge invites me over to his place after work, in order to go over to a close restaurant from his place. In this case, I can only do this when I have a day shift: Done work at 4:00 -- quickest method of transit gets me home by 4:45. I quickly shower and I am ready to leave by 5. Quickest route to his place gets me there at 7:21. Now, quickest route to the restaurant gets us there at 8:30. Stay for a couple hours, and head back to my place, and I arrive home at 12:20. With a car, I get home a 4:08, leave my place by 4:25, at his place by 4:45, at restaurant by 4:55, leave after two hours, drive him back to his place, 7:05, drive back home, 7:25. That's a 5 hour difference. (For those scenarios, I used the GRT trip planner).

Never will be the same -- and yet you justify this with the current GRT schedule.

Let me give you a counterexample. I have been to Japan dozens and dozens of times (for work). I have never driven while there, and never felt the need to. You consult your handy train/bus planner, and find a route to your destination, usually significantly faster than driving, and definitely more predictable. No need to park, pay tolls, find a parking space at the other end, or worry about traffic. This is what is possible. And, yes, both little kids and old people ride the trains and buses.

That's not to say that this is reality in our region today. But it certainly is possible, if we, as a society, decide to invest in transit rather than assuming that all mobility will always rely on a personal automobile.
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(04-03-2021, 08:50 PM)Bytor Wrote:
(04-03-2021, 08:40 PM)jeffster Wrote: No imagination is needed to understand that mobility is not, and never will be, the same without driving. Not even close. I'll give you 3 personal examples:

I think I'd agree with Dan that you have a lack of imagination here. Why? because you don't see to even have thought of the option of giving the money for the 401 widening (and other similar road projects) given over to bettering public transit options so that there wouldn't be the delays you speak of.

No matter how much money you put into transit, you're not going ever, ever, have transit that is even close to convenient as a car. People do value time. I have an elderly parent to take care of. I have a disabled daughter to take care of (and she can't ride transit either way - imagination or not, I have no control over that).

One of the biggest issues with transit is that it is slow -- even if I had zero waiting to do during the entire route, it's still going to be significantly longer. This is why people drive. This is why people took used horse and buggy. We have never had a time in our civilization that people weren't using quick methods of transportation. It's not new.

Funny how you say that I have no imagination, but you can't even give a single example how you can make transit effective, nor how much it would cost -- and inexpensive for the end user, for example, me taking the family down to Grimsby. for example, to visit family.

Show me. Rather than insult me and say I have no imagination. Good grief.

Tell you what: plan out a trip from Sweetbriar and Ruskview in Kitchener to Morrison Crescent in Grimsby. Tell me the cost for 4 people, and the total time. For a car, it's 17 litres of gas, and about 2 hours.

And please tell me how much we'd have to spend on transit to make it usable, 24/7.
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(04-03-2021, 08:50 PM)Bytor Wrote:
(04-03-2021, 08:40 PM)jeffster Wrote: No imagination is needed to understand that mobility is not, and never will be, the same without driving. Not even close. I'll give you 3 personal examples:

I think I'd agree with Dan that you have a lack of imagination here. Why? because you don't see to even have thought of the option of giving the money for the 401 widening (and other similar road projects) given over to bettering public transit options so that there wouldn't be the delays you speak of.

Not to mention developing denser cities so that distances are smaller, and it's more feasible to walk and bike and take transit. All it takes is imagination.

But all this has been explained to Jeffster before, so I'm not going to bother doing so again...he's got his faith.
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(04-03-2021, 09:15 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Never will be the same -- and yet you justify this with the current GRT schedule.

Let me give you a counterexample. I have been to Japan dozens and dozens of times (for work). I have never driven while there, and never felt the need to. You consult your handy train/bus planner, and find a route to your destination, usually significantly faster than driving, and definitely more predictable. No need to park, pay tolls, find a parking space at the other end, or worry about traffic. This is what is possible. And, yes, both little kids and old people ride the trains and buses.

That's not to say that this is reality in our region today. But it certainly is possible, if we, as a society, decide to invest in transit rather than assuming that all mobility will always rely on a personal automobile.

Japan is different than Canada. Tokyo is different than Kitchener/Waterloo. I don't see how this is a good counterexample.

Japan has 129M people and 350 person per square KM. Even if I were to look at Canada, and only 160 KM within the US border (where most people live), and say 35M people (if that - as we're still missing a lot of large cities like Calgary and Edmonton), we have about 960,000 square KM, and about 36 persons per square KM. That's 1/10th of Japan. Transit SHOULD be much better in places like Japan.

That said, 54% of Japanese still own a car (vs 93% in Canada) and drive an average of 10,000, vs 16,000 in Canada. The difference isn't as much as I expected it to be, when I looked it up. So even in Japan, cars are still needed.

I'm sure at some point we can and will have better transit that would work better for most people, but that is not in our lifetime, at least not in our region. We still need to get rid of our NIMBY's and concentrate population to very small concentrations.
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(04-03-2021, 09:16 PM)jeffster Wrote: Funny how you say that I have no imagination, but you can't even give a single example how you can make transit effective, nor how much it would cost -- and inexpensive for the end user, for example, me taking the family down to Grimsby. for example, to visit family.

That's quite the goalpost moving. We've gone from "convenient to get to a vaccination appointment" to "convenient to get a family to a small town" . This discussion didn't start with getting to Grimsby, it started with getting between Kitchener and Cambridge.

No one here is arguing that cars should be banned. It's likely that for rural trips they'll continue to be the most efficient way to get places. But 95% trips are between urban locations, and there it's nothing but a lack of imagination on your part that prevents you from seeing how transit could be more convenient.

People have outlined situations where transit is more convenient than driving (e.g. just about anywhere in Japan). No one is arguing that the current GRT service is competitive, we're arguing that in the future, with changes to our urban form and improvements to our transit system, urban trips could be convenient by transit.

If all you want to do is engage is goalpost moving and strawman-ing, there's not point in debating you. We get it, you hate transit and aren't open to changing your mind. But stop jumping in to conversations on transit with bad faith arguments.
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(04-03-2021, 09:39 PM)jeffster Wrote: Japan is different than Canada. Tokyo is different than Kitchener/Waterloo. I don't see how this is a good counterexample.

Oh, it is indeed different. But you said "never will be" and I basically said "why not"? Why does the future need to be the same as the present?

P.S. Tokyo has only 0.5 cars per household. And most people I know in the Tokyo area don't even own a car, even if they could well afford one.

Imagine that.
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When you don't own a car then you consciously arrange your life so that using transit, cycling and walking is as convenient as possible. People who drive cars tend not to think about choosing a residence that is conveniently near a transit route. They don't think how easy is it to get to work or to shopping from their proposed residence. They end up living in a location that is difficult to get around without a car, so they complain about the inconvenience of transit when someone extols a car-free lifestyle.
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(04-03-2021, 08:40 PM)jeffster Wrote: 1) On Sunday I take my mother to her covid-19 shot, finally. She herself is 80, and can't do a lot of walking. Either way, her vaccination will be at The Boardwalk in Waterloo. Problem 1 - we have no local Sunday service in the area, it was cancelled to help pay for the Ion. Problem 2, even if we could get transit (such as taken a later vaccination date), it would be 2 transfers (3 busses), 20 minutes of walking, about about 4 hours of bus travel time. With a car, it's 12 minutes there and 12 minutes back. At the very least, we're saving 4 hours. And likely she couldn't do all the required walking anyway.

The required mobility here isn’t to get to the Boardwalk; it’s to get a Covid-19 shot. If the city were designed for walking and transit, the Covid-19 shots would be available in locations more convenient to be reached by transit.

Quote:2) Say my buddy in Cambridge invites me over to his place after work, in order to go over to a close restaurant from his place. In this case, I can only do this when I have a day shift: Done work at 4:00 -- quickest method of transit gets me home by 4:45. I quickly shower and I am ready to leave by 5. Quickest route to his place gets me there at 7:21. Now, quickest route to the restaurant gets us there at 8:30. Stay for a couple hours, and head back to my place, and I arrive home at 12:20. With a car, I get home a 4:08, leave my place by 4:25, at his place by 4:45, at restaurant by 4:55, leave after two hours, drive him back to his place, 7:05, drive back home, 7:25. That's a 5 hour difference. (For those scenarios, I used the GRT trip planner).

Similarly, there is at least a chance your buddy and/or you would live in a more transit-convenient location. Or maybe work is equipped with showers (originally intended for cyclists), so you shower there and proceed directly on the Ion to the restaurant.

Quote:3) Invited to a relatives or friends that are out of town. It's not happening without a car.

Car share; need I say more?

Quote:Now, if you have suggestions how one can do those above things without a car, I'll listen. But the only thing I can imagine is using a driverless car, and I think that would get expensive quick once it is available.

Cars give a quality of life and options and flexibility and time. Just like in the old times where a horse and buggy would do the same. Hell, with the above cases, a horse and buggy would be quicker every time.

Back to this discussion: do I think we need to widen the road RIGHT NOW? Not really. Between Highway 8 and Hespeler was fine. Between Hespeler and Townline? Probably not. But it's part of their master plan and has been on the books for a long time.

It’s not really about making all current car trips feasible by transit. It’s about designing the city so that transit works for more trips. And it’s not about a sudden revolution where we demolish the entire city (or at least, all the post-1960 suburbs) and rebuild. Rather, we start by doing several things, at a minimum: widen roads only grudgingly and sparingly, rather than enthusiastically, often when the traffic numbers don’t justify it even under the assumption that driving demand must be catered to; eliminate parking minima and allow people to choose how they want to live; dramatically loosen zoning restrictions that arbitrarily and capriciously restrict property use; implement a large carbon fee and dividend, so that costs are internalized to the person making the decision and benefitting from it; and so on.
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OK, sure, cars are useful in KW's urban form today. They are even useful in Montreal and make some trips faster. But for me those are pretty uncommon trips and I'd be happy to take a taxi instead of owning a car. But people like owning the biggest possible car and spending tons of money on it for some reason. Me, I own a Mazda 2 and try to not use it when possible.

As many people have said, it's really about making most trips doable without a car. They may still be slower by transit. But the tradeoff is that they are accessible to more people, safer, and don't require attention while driving. I think that having better transit rather than expanding roadways is usually the right solution and much cheaper.

I have been in Wellington since January 2020 without owning a car. It's hilly. An ebike would be nice (and they are pretty popular). Sometimes I get rides from people with cars, e.g. when the weather is bad. But in general I wouldn't really want to have a car here. I also find it stressful to drive: the roads are pretty narrow and one often has to drive almost in the oncoming lane because there isn't really enough space in one's lane. I have rented cars when away from Wellington, and that has worked out for me.
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