I agree.

But has anyone, anywhere, done any studies of the likely economic impact of shutting down this portion of the economy?

There's the auto industry itself, the big ones, their suppliers, (Ford, Chrysler, GM, Magna), the steel companies that depend on them to a great degree, the auto-repair shops, the road maintenance work, the financial markets, the oil industry, ....

I think that the answer is not to get rid of cars, so much as it is to change the cars themselves. I think electric cars (i.e. Fuel cells) are probably going to be pretty common place in 10 years. This doesn't exactly solve the problem, as all it does is shift our consumption from the car to the power plant, but its a start.

And at least Buzz Hargrove will be happy.

There is no question but that the quality of public transport must be radically improved, not only for the reasons Magoo states, but because our ageing population will need easier access.

Less-polluting cars, though essential in those rural areas and for needs that will always be met by individual vehicles (ambulances, delivery and service vehicles, etc.) are no solution to the problem of sprawl and the social and cultural destruction caused by "Autocracy".

I think Buzz Hargrove would be every bit as happy if his union members were building trains and trams. Carfree cities would require a massive investment in rolling stock and infrastructure. Moreover, they would require intelligent densification - that is, building housing with more storeys, but ensuring adequate green space and a lot of trees, and massive public-works projects.

I think that eventually, this would mean fewer people working in the transport industry, but the transition period would be long enough to ensure the changes could be largely due to attrition and that younger workers in the field could be retrained for new fields.

Suburban sprawl has eaten up huge amounts of public funds since the Second World War.

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I'm always amused by people who think we were born with the desire to get behind the wheel of a car. Funny, I've lived for longer than I like to admit without any such desire.

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Something that I think is funny, and sad, is that there's a train line running half-way up the Island from Victoria to Courtenay, but it only goes once in each direction, daily, and leaves victoria to go north at 8 am. It seems to me that they've intentionally designed its schedule and lack of service to get rid of train service all together, but maybe I'm just being pessimistic. It's cheaper (and more pleasant) than taking the bus but far less convinient, and same goes for cars, for those who have them.

Greyhound keeps on upping its already pretty pricey fares, so more people, including me, are opting for air travel. ViaRail is just so outrageously expensive that only out-of-country tourists can afford to take it. Better funding for transit, at least in BC, would help an awful lot, too. We have had funding frozen for 3 years, I think, and service has been cut while fares increased. It's not just a matter of building more busses, etc., it's about being smarter with the ones that we already have.

edited to add: i type slowly.

[ 23 July 2004: Message edited by: wizkid ]

The sprawl that they require is incredibly expensive. The car culture that emerging economies want to emulate is unsustainable now.

The most lucid responses to what we are actually going to have to do economically are centred around massive public investment in public transit infrastructure, de-sprawling our cities, and the like. (I believe that fuel cells rely on heavily polluting coal plants and batteries that are difficult to dispose of.)

This public investment will require tax revenues, and a shift from private investment.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
The downside of public transportation is, unfortunately, the public. I'd rather walk or bike, if possible, than be crushed between some smelly guy's armpit and some woman's 22 bags of groceries on the 5:00 subway. It's not just that cars are so liberating and individual and exciting... it's that the alternative can be like the $2.25, no-music moshpit.

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I mean what is liberating about being stuck in congestion in a city or almost routine back-ups on highways.

What is liberating about having to drive around for ages looking for parking and then having to pay through the nose for it.

What is freeing about having to be in a constant state of alert to all the other bad drivers, pedestrians or cyclists.

I think public transport can be much more freeing, I can sit there in comfort reading, sleeping, meditating,people watching without really being overly concerned about traffic conditions.

TTC can be frustrating but this I think is just due to the chronic lack of funding. Even as it stands the subways are not always packed to overflowing. Street cars tend to be worse but this again is a funding issue. It is disingenous to compare a chronically neglected system with car travel.

Also imagine the freedom of being able to breath,or crossing the street without fear of being hit by an half-wit with anger management problems.

What about the freedom of having quiter less congested streets.

Having access to a vehicle is also really nice if you want to get reasonably close to a camping area, or move to a different home, although those demands could be met by some sort of carshare association.

[ 23 July 2004: Message edited by: wizkid ]

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Originally posted by lagatta:
Suburban sprawl has eaten up huge amounts of public funds since the Second World War.

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And it has eaten up great tracts of land. In the Fraser Valley, suburban development has paved over much of the best farm land in Canada. And forests have been hacked down to build malls. (Funny how people who complain about clear cuts are so willing to live in one.) Cars don't cause this devastation; they just enable it. Un-controlled development is a blight. If the developers had to pay the ancillary costs that went with their projects, they would be less inclined to encourage sprawl.

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
It's unfortunate, because I'm told that Toronto's public transit is not that bad... I wonder what the 'worse' is like?

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Sometimes it's crowded, but often I can find a seat, even in rush hour. And right downtown (which is where I live), there's usually frequent service on the bus routes during busy times, and a reasonable schedule the rest of the time too.

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I actually don't find it that bad at all.

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Thoreau once said something about the difference between walking to your destination and working to pay for the train. You arrive at roughly the same time, but one of you had a walk in the country, while the other one spent a week in the factory working to pay for the train ticket first.

[ 23 July 2004: Message edited by: arborman ]

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Well, we could talk about the New York subway system

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The rolling stock is pretty good, but some of the stations. Yikes.

I had to use the Spring St. station at around 10:30pm last December. Well, maybe it was the buzzing half-on flourescent lighting and the locked and chained exits and the 4 lines of pitch-black track with the occasional express whizzing through and the decrepit platform, but I thought what the hell am I doing here alone? Cab! Cab!

We currently live in a bit of a vicious circle in our cities. We build massive subdivisions on the assumption that people will drive to and from work. This makes transit systems nearly unworkable, as they require a certain density to be cost effective.

So nobody rides the bus, and we build more roads, which result in more cars and less buses. And so on.

Rural areas are different, but 80% of Canadians live in cities, so I'm prepared to accept a need for rural cars/trucks if we can just deal with the city dwellers.

The freedom offered by car ownership for city dwellers can be easily provided by a range of options. The most obvious is to take the ~$5000 you would spend on a car in a year, and spend it on a rental car, whenever you have the slightest desire to get out of the city etc. Arborwoman and I did this for years.

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Originally posted by Mandos:
So now that we've messed up, what do we do now?

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I'm guessing we suffer the consequences.

Not that, y'know, I'm a cynical pessimist who's too lazy to offer any solutions or anything . . .

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Originally posted by Mr. Magoo:
The downside of public transportation is, unfortunately, the public. I'd rather walk or bike, if possible, than be crushed between some smelly guy's armpit and some woman's 22 bags of groceries on the 5:00 subway. It's not just that cars are so liberating and individual and exciting... it's that the alternative can be like the $2.25, no-music moshpit.

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There are people in Toronto who want to get rid of the trolleys. Derail the Streetcar

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There are people who believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the earth is flat, and that the moon landings were faked.

Despite all the cuts, Toronto has a pretty good public transit system.

But that isn't going to last much longer if the system doesn't get a major infusion of cash and soon.

I think what has to happen is that public transit has to be made more attractive to car owners. We simply need more of it.

It also means that some public transit routes are going to have to run at a bit of a loss in the short term. I think that folks have to feel comfortable that a new transit line is going to be there next year and the year after so that they can make decisions on where they live etc. based on the existance of a public transit service.

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Originally posted by arborman:
The freedom offered by car ownership for city dwellers can be easily provided by a range of options. The most obvious is to take the ~$5000 you would spend on a car in a year, and spend it on a rental car, whenever you have the slightest desire to get out of the city etc. Arborwoman and I did this for years.

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The problem is that the rental places discriminate against anyone who doesn't have a credit card, from what I can tell. Do they even take cash deposits?

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Originally posted by Hailey:
I admire people who are able to make the changes in their life to get rid of a vehicle. I'm quite attached to the freedom of driving.

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That is such a shame, Hailey.

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the freedom of driving.

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That's what our brave boys are fighting for.

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I admire people who are able to make the changes in their life to get rid of a vehicle. I'm quite attached to the freedom of driving

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Snerk!
"Attached"? Chained, more like.

How much freedom do gas prices, car payments, and insurance costs (not to mention the endless hours spent inside a vehicle) allow you to have?

Yes, I think some kind of shared cars or "bush taxi" service could be appropriate in small towns and the countryside. The pollution problem is not caused by those few cars - it is caused by the horror of suburban sprawl, with what are functionally urban areas designed in such a way (or not designed at all) as to make 24-7, quality public transport impossible.

Freedom is not having to own a car!

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Originally posted by radiorahim:

It also means that some public transit routes are going to have to run at a bit of a loss in the short term.

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Well, yeah. We're probably going to have to run the roads at a bit of a loss for a while, too.
Public transit is and should be a subsidized thing, just as the infrastructure on which cars run is subsidized.

Incidentally--I think to some extent a place like Paris has an excellent subway system simply through age. Density's important of course. But they started building subways a long time ago. When you build long-lived infrastructure like a tunnel, it's still there much much later. If you started making them long ago and keep on building extensions, eventually you have lots and lots. So Paris has tons, Montreal's metro is fairly extensive. And cool; I loved it when I lived there. Of course, I was a kid.

Here in Vancouver on the other hand, we started building skytrain in 1986 or something, and so we don't have much stuff yet. And yeah, it's expensive and stuff, and we're still paying through the nose for most of it. But in thirty years, all that expensive stuff will still be there, and as long as we haven't done some really stupid public-private partnership it will still belong to the people of the province. If we keep on making more extensions (as we inevitably will; if there's a system and governance to oversee it, the people running it will find reasons to make more) eventually we'll have lots and it may look like a good transit system, even the parts that currently look like overpriced boondoggles.

[ 27 July 2004: Message edited by: Rufus Polson ]

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Originally posted by DrConway:

The problem is that the rental places discriminate against anyone who doesn't have a credit card, from what I can tell. Do they even take cash deposits?

As well they discriminate against anyone under 25, and charge extra.

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I know that some of them take a cash deposit of about $400. Personally, I maintain a credit card with a zero balance and a $500 limit for that sort of thing, but before that I did the cash deposit. Again, take, say, 4 months insurance payments and set it aside to handle any cash deposits that become necessary.

DrConway, I believe you live in Vancouver, in which case you would be better served by the Car Coop. Right here

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You'd think that with the vast distances across Canada and the U.S.A. that we'd be trying to connect cities and towns with high speed rail service like in Japan, Europe and now China in attracting truck loads of foreign investment.

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You'd think so, yes, but nostalgia for the so-called golden age of passenger rail -- and admiration for the Japenese and European systems -- obscures something important. I'm told the Canadian railways wanted to get out of the passenger-rail business even in the "golden age" -- i.e., generations ago. And those vast distances, which aren't a factor in Japan or France, had something to do with it.

Now, I admit that all I really have to back this up is a conversation my father had with a senior CPR guy in the late 1950s. It was part of the CPR's charter, or something, that they had to carry passengers. But SCPRG was saying they couldn't make money at the prices the market would bear, and absent government subsidy, they'd just as soon haul freight only. (VIA Rail, a clumsy solution to this problem -- it's never owned its own tracks and runs at the pleasure of the two "real" railways -- lay a good decade and a half in the future at this point).

So if this supposed lack of profitability still obtains, foreign (or even domestic) investment won't flow into new high-speed or other new passenger rail systems -- absent some technological/economic revolution -- and government support would be the only way to get them up and running. And we know how enthusiastic Canadian and US governments are about that these days.

[ 27 July 2004: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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Originally posted by Fidel:
You'd think that with the vast distances across Canada and the U.S.A. that we'd be trying to connect cities and towns with high speed rail service like in Japan, Europe and now China in attracting truck loads of foreign investment. Amtrak in the States is slowly being dismantled and starved of cash in order to make a better case for privatisation. British trains and buses just stopped running on time after John and Maggie were through pauperizing that country.

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Canada does't have a population density that Japan or Europe have making this less viable.

High speed trains would be viable in the Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal corridor, in the Edmonton Calgary corridor and between Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.

However, a very high speed rail system that could compete, speed and price wise, with air travel, would be an excellent long-term project.

AIr travel is going to become more and more expensive as the oil shocks start hitting hard over the next few years. We will lose a number of airlines, and service will drop. Rather than prop up an environmentally destructive and ultimately doomed industry, we would be well served to replace it with high speed rail. Leave the planes for crossing oceans, and getting to the more isolated regions, and build a solid train system for the rest.