Quote:
Originally Posted by hulkrogan
Regarding transportation, I get as pissed off as the next guy sitting in traffic on a Saturday trying to get across the city, but it seems just letting people suffer in traffic is the #1 way to win against sprawl. If you know you're signing up for an hour long commute that is just going to get worse, do you still want the giant house in the middle of nowhere?
Then do we have to worry about people jumping to Okotoks/Airdrie/Cochrane? I'd say you could discourage a lot of it just by making those commutes as hellish as they probably should be.
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That's exactly the philosophy of increasing density. By placing the car dead last in future infrastructure priority it overtime effectively makes your car commute impossible and thus you are forced to move close to a transit node or within walking distance of work.
It's a huge myth that 'smart growth' decreases car congestion on existing infrastructure. It doesn't, because when given a choice where commute timing are equal 9/10 people will choose to go to work in the comfort of their own cars versus sitting next to smelly people on the bus/train so much so that they will pay excess amounts over the train option to not take it.
So for every person that moves close enough to work to walk and takes their car off the road, it just enables another spot on the road for someone else to take their car. Also even if all population growth occurs in TOD developments and 'walkable' communities, it's not like every person wouldn't own a car. On a per capita basis car usage will go down, but on an overall basis it's naive to assume that that too would go down. It's just that in a 'smart gowth' scenario, the car slips in priority from #1 or #2 to dead last and it will be a challange to keep up roadway improvements.