Quote:
Originally Posted by Bunk
My former thesis supervisor and program director of Urban and Regional Planning, David Gordon, has done a crapload of work breaking down the data that is a pretty decent illustration of places in cities one can (and does) reasonably exist without car dependency.
Here is the picture of Calgary and Vancouver (not the same scale of the image). He suggests the difference in the "active core" whereby a lot of people walk and take transit and that car-dependent lifestyles are avoidable. There is certainly a bigger area in Vancouver, but not way, way bigger as a proportion of the metro region. We are however, way, way better than Vancouver was when it was our size in the late 80s or early 90s. Continued densification, transit system expansion (Green line and MAX BRT), pedestrian and cycling upgrades will catch us up in time.
Note - he was missing the WLRT in his image
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It’s a really interesting topic - I’m an advocate of driving less and not necessarily owning a car. I’m sure there’s a good vent diagram to be made of ‘needing’ a car vs. ‘wanting’ a car vs. ‘Not wanting’ (parking, $$, etc). The trade offs are unique to each individual situation (you can live somewhere where a car is completely unnecessary for almost everything, but if you happen to work somewhere else that is difficult to reach without a car, you’re still hooped).
As for the discussion of airport LRT, I still think the biggest benefit will be to the many employees at the airport. Usage by average travellers (be it Calgarians or otherwise) will not add much convenience for very many and therefore will not be used a ton (possibly leading to low frequency of trains, exacerbating inconvenience)
A question I’ve asked many times but never found an answer for: where would the airport station be? Armchair QB using google maps, I don’t see an easy way to get it close to the terminal(s) - anything more than a 5 minute indoor walk to get to the auto drop-off/pick-up areas would be another big negative...
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