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Old Posted Feb 1, 2022, 3:10 AM
memph memph is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady View Post
"Choice riders" as non-car owners only is misleading. Maybe they choose not to buy a car, or they choose to live in a place where a car is not a necessity. To build a city where the car is not a necessity is the main goal to begin with. Such definition of "choice riders" means continuing to strive towards facilitating cars and satisfying the demands of car owners as the main goal.
Yeah, I agree with this. People who own a car are likely to continue using it, and they probably won't sell it either. But if it gets old and breaks down and isn't worth fixing, or if they're non-car owners, that's a more important decision point imo. If a significant proportion of people decide they don't have to arrange their finances with the idea that they will need a car in the future, that's a big deal. If you look at what percentage of the population becomes first time car owners each year, and add to that the percentage who replace old cars with new ones, that's maybe 10% of the adult population? If every single one of those decide that the car isn't necessary because they can use transit now, and only 20% used transit as the baseline, then that's like a 50% increase in transit ridership in a single year which is absolutely massive and unprecedented.

So there's really no need to build transit that's so amazing that people will sell their cars. You just need to get them to forgo buying new ones. You'll probably have the most luck doing that with young people, who are already used to using transit as teenagers or college students, and reach the point where they could (barely) afford a car, but decide to spend the money on something else because the transit system is good enough.

Los Angeles is pretty similar to Brampton/Mississauga. Similar moderate densities, similar decentralized employment, similar car transportation system of large arterials (and highways). Brampton & Mississauga have pretty moderate transit ridership, they still feel very auto-oriented. It's not the upper middle class middle aged people using it (as it is with GO trains or the TTC subway). I would say it's mostly working class, elderly and students/teens using it. But those demographics do use transit at decent rates and add up to a good bit of people. Even if you exclude GO Transit ridership, Mississauga and Brampton have per capita higher transit ridership than LA County from MiWay/Brampton Transit, so LA Transit still has a lot of room for ridership growth without having to attract affluent users.
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