Post by admin

Pitting drivers against transit users is cheap and easy politics and it doesn’t help anyone (except maybe the politician).

Drivers aren’t inherently against transit any more than transit users are inherently against cars. That just becomes the end result when you make both groups fight over the little slivers of road space we currently have.

(For the sake of argument, let’s not even talk about cyclists, pedestrians and service vehicles who share our roads as well.)

Cities are growing at an exponential pace but the road infrastructure we built a hundred years ago was not meant to handle what they do today. Congestion may be a problem, but it’s not unexpected. Indeed, it’s almost natural.

The solution we came up with a hundred years ago was to put trains in tunnels underground. The idea worked. It still works.

Problem is, those tunnels were largely built by cheap, unskilled, foreign, exploited laborers with few rights and even fewer prospects. Nowadays, it’s hard(er) to exploit foreign labour on the soil of a western country. Instead, we outsource it to Asia. It’s very hard, however, to outsource a tunnel.

Basically, the economics no longer work. It’s time to admit that and recognize that. Transit can exist in places other than on the ground or below the ground. As cities grow, they naturally expand upwards as well as outwards to maximize the space available.  Our transit, however, doesn’t.

Maybe it’s time it should.