Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
I don’t think this is a fair view of the things roads need to pay for though. They also need to cover the costs of transit and other measures that keep roads empty. Without transit spending road spending would need to be substantially higher and given that transit is the less desirable form of transportation the costs of transit should be borne by the people who reap the benefits which are car drivers.
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Transit spending is pretty substantial, the City's net operating costs are higher for transit than roads and capital spending is roughly 50:50 for roads vs transit (not counting the Green Line) even though car passenger-trips are about 9X higher than transit .
The Red and Blue lines that were built pretty cheaply on high ridership corridors are a positive benefit for drivers that are headed to the core; but I doubt the the expensive Green Line with mediocre ridership will be (similar to numerous other terrible LRT projects in the US). Even the City's own estimate is that it'll only take off the equivalent of about 6000 cars off the roads. I would expect that the money for Stage 1 being used to upgrade Deerfoot would have more benefits to drivers in time savings or enabling more trips.