Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Townline Road

[jeffster]

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.