I've heard Santiago, Chile, and other cities limits drivers to only drive two days a week, with the 'driveable' days indicated on motorist license plates. Maybe Canadian roads aren't as busy as that yet, but it's getting close to such extreme solutions.
Not to worry people, when the new millennium Depression arrives, no one will be able to afford gas for their army-issue tanks anyway, plus there'll be a whole new unforeseeable series of significant things to occupy our emotion, physical, economic and environment concerns.
So traffic is costing our economy billions of dollars each year, as well as untold suffering and pollution?
Easy solution: the Nobel Prize awarded in Traffic Management, with a cash prize of $50million. Let the greed incentives take care of the rest. Policy won't fix it; governments are too stupid.
The answer lies in two words: carbon tax. The federal round table agrees with most reseach in the field: we will not build the infrastructure for clean, livable, urban cites until the environmental and infrastructural subsidies for car-culture are ended. But with no political leadership on the horizon in Ottawa, we will just have to rely on that great Canadian solution: sit and wait till the Americans do it first.
Carbon Tax perhaps — but only if it is a dedicated tax, and doesn't get folded into general revenues.
I'm curious of any thoughts on PRT as a mode of transit. =0) and as a solution to many of the transit problems we currently have. I'm eager to see how the first project/s go. I think its benefits will attract more riders who hate public transit because of sitting at bus stops (in the freezing cold?) and longer commutes because of frequent stops... and sharing breathing space with lots of strangers squashed up against each other in rush hour. haha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
vaalea: It's the only way to go. The main resistance to public transit is the insistence that we herded to collection points. I would go one step further, and replace the present roadways with the system that would make PRT possible, and I would put it underground (as much as possible) for aesthetics. That way, the concrete and asphalt could be turned into green space, and there would no longer be any need to have a waste-of-space garage attached to the house.
And the system would be fully automated, so that a user could simply put in a call for a "car" when required.
In a nutshell, the only successful applications to the "crunch" of city living will be those which can cater to our individual preferences (within the whole), rather than force us to comply with some centralized (and hence, politically manipulatable) behemoth.
