Can transit afford to electrify?
Quebec has set up deadlines for public transit to be fully electrified, but the commissions face cutting down their services to deal with their deficits. It seems unlikely they can afford to meet that deadline without deep cuts in service.
DeWolf 21:55 on 2023-11-06 Permalink
One bus every hour, but at least it’s electric!
Ian 22:28 on 2023-11-06 Permalink
My kid was stuck in Lasalle this evening waiting for a bus that was over a half hour late so I just drove down from the Plateau to pick her up.
As I’ve said before, if the system isn’t reliable, nobody will rely on it.
Maybe this is a problem we can solve with clowns.
Chris 10:49 on 2023-11-07 Permalink
Ian, do you own that car, or did you use communauto? If you could *rely* on transit, you wouldn’t need to own a car, would you?
Ian 11:29 on 2023-11-07 Permalink
Hoo boy Chris, you sure are clever. What a smart, good boy. Do you feel better now?
Anyway, I’ll feed the trolls against my better instincts…
I’d love to not own a car. I made it to the age of 45 before I even got a driver’s license. I specifically bought one because I live downtown and started work in Ste Anne, as I work in a location-specific role. For the first three years I took transit, even winter night classes ending at 10:30 and morning classes at 8:30. I would get home no earlier than 12:30 and would have to get up at 5:30 because transit is slow even when it comes on time. Did you know the bus can only go 90 on the highway? Now add construction, snow, etc. Even better, consider that the 211 buses are some of the most poorly maintained buses in the network, may have doors that don’t properly seal and even sometimes windows that don’t entirely close.
I would have taken the train except that its schedule is predicated on 9 to 5 workers heading downtown in the morning and out west at night so I would have had to hang around an extra couple of hours every day, and take the bus anyway after 5:30. The REM, when it finally opens, has all its stations that are west of St Jean north of the 40. Most of the schools and towns are south of the 20. The REM will not help us there.
Anyway, in the end I was spending up to 4-5 hours a day on transit and my back started going out on those hard 211 seats. Driving, I spend 2 – 2.5 hours on the road tops.
But yeah, let’s say I didn’t have a car –
I did have a communauto membership for years though, and the thing is it’s still cars on the road making up for the fact that public transit isn’t reliable. If I had to go pick up my kid in Lasalle of course I would have taken communauto.
If you seriously think that the reason transit is bad in the city is becasue people have cars, you are dreaming in technicolour. Go the SW where far fewer people have cars and guess what, transit is even worse than downtown. Out in the on-island burbs I can almost see your point but as I’ve mentioned before even Baie-d’Urfé has a higher population density than Sherbrooke so if we figure out how to get west of Dorval in under an hour from downtown it’s not a density issue. People buy cars because they can’t get around effectively otherwise.
If there was effective, reliable transit, people would have fewer cars. It’s not complicated.
bumper carz 12:21 on 2023-11-07 Permalink
@Ian the driver: “If there was effective, reliable transit, people would have fewer cars. It’s not complicated.”
So let’s double the price of cars and parking, and plow all the money into effective, reliable transit! Yay, we’re all saved!
(Now it gets complicated as suburbanites only really care about their own bottom line on a day-to-day basis)
Ian 13:14 on 2023-11-07 Permalink
Let’s be real here, public transit is underfunded, yes, not because of a lack of money. It’s political will.
I refer you to the SPVM budget, for example.
If the government was to take your advice, qatzi, it would probably get plowed back into new cruisers for the cops.
bumper carz 17:17 on 2023-11-07 Permalink
Yes, Ian. It’s *underfunded*, but this has absolutely nothing to do with *not having money allocated to it.*
Let me just burn all my dictionaries and I’ll be right back…
Ian 17:29 on 2023-11-07 Permalink
Those aren’t the words I used, but if you can’t discern the difference, maybe you should burn your dictionaries. They aren’t doing you much good. Of course the governement could afford to fund public transit, even now. They jsut don’t want to. This particular correlation is one of your ridiculous hobbyhorses, that you see it as a matter of dictionaries is telling.
If you want to play at semantics, whatever. I’m done feeding the trolls for today.
Chris 00:02 on 2023-11-08 Permalink
>Hoo boy Chris, you sure are clever. What a smart, good boy. Do you feel better now?
Yowzers. Why the hostility? Putting that aside… (maybe you mistook my question marks for rhetorical flourish, when I was actually just asking a question).
Thanks for your lengthy reply all the same. So, since you own a car, you are *already* not relying on transit (“to rely”: “to be dependent for support, help, or supply.”) That’s not a dig on you, just a statement of fact. Many others are in your boat.
“As I’ve said before, if the system isn’t reliable, nobody will rely on it.” Exactly. But the deficits and funding cuts discussed in the article won’t make the system unreliable, _it already is_, and has always been. It’s *already* unreliable, and as we can all see with our eyes, people have bought cars because of this fact. If the populace could rely on transit, many fewer people would choose to buy cars. But our transit is not reliable in speed, frequency, schedule, comfort, ergonomics, etc., as your examples illustrate. If it was even halfway reliable, you could probably settle for a communauto membership, but as it’s not even that, you’re willing to spend substantial money on your own vehicle. And once people own a vehicle, they’ll use transit even less. And the cycle continues.
Ian 08:20 on 2023-11-08 Permalink
My apologies, Chris – I did mistake your tone.
We appear to be on the same page.
Anton 09:53 on 2023-11-08 Permalink
So hostility is necessary when one is not „on the same page“
Ian 12:39 on 2023-11-08 Permalink
No, but when we take one anothers’ tone as hostile, it is only reasonable to respond in kind.
Are you trying to pick a fight, Anton?