And it’s infuriating that we are planning highly disruptive and expensive road widening projects, when investments in public transportation and active transportation could remove the “need” to widen roads!
Car-centric infrastructure is not sustainable, and every time I hear people moan and bitch about taxes, they should know that it’s largely due to runaway road work and maintenance costs!
NOTE: the far left lable on the bottom chart is “less than 15 minutes.” Factor in several minutes for stop signs and red lights, WHY THE HELL DRIVE AT ALL? 😡
Becuase we make the transition experience for everyone outside a car shitty as fuck in Canada.
We need to be more like Montreal. 💁♂️
Montreal is far, FAR from good public transit. As soon as you’re outside of the core central area of the city, a 20 minute drive turns to a 1 or 1.5 hour trip. It takes me 8 minutes to drive to work, 12 to bike, and 30 to take the bus.
Even if you’re in the city, certain routes take 45 minutes via the subway instead of just 20 by car (parking is still a nightmare though.)
I’ve only ever taken public transit in Montreal, Toronto, New York City, and Paris. Paris is pretty damn decent, and I didn’t have any incidents in Toronto. NYC was pretty confusing sometimes. Montreal is absolutely abysmal though compared to the other 3.
Of course, that’s just my opinion, you’d much rather hear from people who live these other cities.
I bought an ebike. In the first week, I had 3 people try to take it from me while I was on it. I can’t go shopping, or take it anywhere where I would have to leave it alone. The cops don’t give a fuck, the city doesn’t give a fuck. I’m going back to a car.
What the fuck? I live in a place where you can’t leave them out, but you got bike-jacked thrice?
I got insurance on mine, $25 a year covers both theft/damage and liability. As compared to about $3,000 for a car. At work I can park it inside the building but I’ve used it for shopping plenty, oddly enough there are bike racks at grocery stores here. Locked for a short time. If weather is dry I also pop out the battery and take it into the store.
Like I said, that was just the first week, I’ve lost count of how many attempts.
Wow, where was that?
May I ask what city? We have a trail in Oshawa that is frequented by homeless and drug addicts, and a few times I’ve been run at by one person in particular ( this guy also made attempts to stop my son and a friend of his in separate incidents, and they’re in their 20s), and also a few small groups have purposely blocked the trail as I approached.
They never got me, but I swore if it ever happened again, I would get one of those retractable batons.
The unfortunate thing is that this trail is a major connection between the waterfront and the city, and there really aren’t any other safe ways around it unless I want to contend with high-speed traffic.
So I can certainly empathize, it really is a shame that it came down to that for you. I would suggest still using it, perhaps not in that same area, but to do errands or other recreational rides, just to get more comfortable. Some people suck, but don’t let that spoil a good thing.
Ding ding ding! Montreal is the closest to true European city design.
Montreal actually has proper street vs road differentiation where they don’t actually try and turn everything into a strode.