Cities in most parts of the world have grown into gigantic and sprawling metropolises with millions and millions of people, as well as millions more who merely pass through them every day. Most people still like taking their own car, a growing trend that has resulted in some cities’ air quality becoming extremely unhealthy. Apart from the pollution issue, it is also becoming ever more difficult to navigate one’s way through cities, as most highways and main streets have come to resemble 24-hour parking lots.
One way of dealing with congestion is to build more and wider roads and highways. Another, such as practised by the City of London in England, involves road charges or tolls. Then, there is the option of building and/or expanding public-transit systems. Needless to say that all these scenarios have friends and foes.
Building more roads is not an option everywhere. Cities have used up most of the space available to them, and annexing more and more land is impractical or even impossible. Besides, people seem to want convenience, and in places that boast a dense and functional public-transit network, they tend to embrace the “public option” quite enthusiastically. It does add to the quality of life if one can easily hop on a bus or train at all hours and get just about from any point A to any point B, like in London, Vienna or New York, for example.
One Canadian newspaper columnist, Gary Mason, has written an article in support of public transit, using the Vancouver area as an example, arguing that more funds will have to be raised to build the kind of network that people will actually want to use. In that sense, he adheres to the old adage of “Build it, and they will come”.
Another Canadian columnist, Kevin Libin, however, takes the opposite view. Relying on an American transport consultant – with the exception of New York and a few other cities, the US has an extremely poor track record in public transit – Libin argues that the potential of public transit has been “overblown” in a “scandalous” fashion and that public transit is not sustainable.
In a Canadian context, it is true that the potential has been “overblown”, or, perhaps, simply “blown”, because every major Canadian city still lags seriously behind the well-oiled transit systems found in so many world cities. Toronto’s “two and a half” subway lines, for example, can be described as nothing short of embarrassing when compared to London or Paris. Calgary’s own transit system is still relatively young and growing, but it is so sparse that people are often better off driving themselves, and once people reach the city limits, there is absolutely no service at all. A brand-new and enormous shopping mall just outside Calgary, therefore, is accessible by car only.
European cities are much older than their counterparts in the US and Canada. Both in London and Vienna, for example, there are many narrow and oddly-winding side streets, yet it would be difficult to find even one that was not accessible via public transit. By contrast, North-American cities with their artificial and clinical grid patterns would be so much easier to open up to trains (subways and light-rail) and buses.
Not surprisingly, Europeans are satisfied and regular users of public transit, and their networks, therefore, keep improving and expanding, whereas Americans and Canadians use it only reluctantly at first and then, after a handful of disappointing experiences, swear never to use it again, thus starting a vicious cycle where the transit systems are left to deteriorate.
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