What I did find surprising traveling Europe last summer was that almost every major city had a much better transit system than Calgary's. And we're talking cities that had their core built hundreds of years ago. The subway/tram/bus systems of Prague, Barcelona, Paris, Budapest and Vienna were all well designed with routes going in many directions. They did not suffer from the funnel problem that Calgary has where the major fast routes only go to and away from downtown. I traveled with ease in these places solely with a combination of walking and transit.
If all you need to do in Calgary is go downtown and back or go somewhere on the train line like the University or Chinook then its acceptable for anybody remotely close to a C-Train stop. Trying to go from the NE to the NW, from anywhere to the deep SW, from the SE to the SW, etc is a complete disaster involving multiple bus routes that could take 2+ hours or worse depending on the frequency of certain routes and your timing in catching the connections. I had a summer job once where I had to basically taxi some employees from the newer NE suburbs to the newest W suburbs because transit would have taken that person probably over 2 hours. As it was it took about 45 minutes by car. Having a transit system that takes 3 times longer than by car to go to work is pretty ridiculous.
Anyways I get the sense that some people in this thread are just doing their usual rah-rah Calgary cheerleading role, just getting defensive about Calgary and blindly believing that our city can't really be that bad compared to most cities. I wonder if some of those people have visited or lived in a wide variety of Canadian, US and European cities and used transit there. That said clearly some people that have homes and business conveniently located such that their Calgary transit experience will be positive. But try and imagine going to every one of your friend's houses via transit and you'll soon realize that the system is far from ideal. Personally I can't agree with the idea that if most people can get from home to work (downtown) to home just fine then the system is alright. My standards are a bit higher after seeing what cities who were constructed long before Calgary have managed to accomplish.
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