Regional and Intercity Bus\Rail Transportation

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by phil235

The Toronto metropolitan area includes Peel, York and most of Durham. It was 2.2 million in 1967.

You're mixing up the population and terminology here.

The old Metro Toronto (not the census metropolitan area) had about 2 million alone when GO was launched (extrapolating between census of 1.8M in 1961 and 2.1M in 1971). Hamilton was probably at a quarter million. Add in the rest of the GTA and it was over 3M by the time GO was launched.

Originally Posted by phil235

I would say that if a very limited service from Rockland can get 500 riders per day, that would suggest that a better, more integrated service would easily be viable.

This report is a bit dated. But in 2014, they were looking at 15 000 riders per month:

http://www.clarence-rockland.com/images/crtreport.pdf

So that's about 500 riders per day. Across their entire transit system. They are about to get less when Stage 2 opens. Why use CRT when you can drive to Trim and park for free and ride OC Transpo? And just like we'll have made it easier to move to an exurb and pay no taxes to the City of Ottawa while getting a salary here and even benefiting from the transit system.

Originally Posted by phil235

For the record, I live downtown and have absolutely no stake in the commuter game. I just strongly support integrated regional transportation in principle, and this argument that good transit leads to sprawl is a new one for me. I've never seen anything suggesting that before. Do you have anything backing up the claim that commuter bus lines lead to sprawl?

Here's a simple thought exercise. Would the GTA have sprawled out as much as it did without GO or would they have been forced to densify if the only form of transit expansion was subway extensions? Compare the Golden Horseshoe to the Lower Mainland and you'll see the difference here.