After we “dig a big ass tunnel,” here are 5 simple ways we can reduce congestion without asking people to drive less - eviltoast

Here are 5 other steps we can take to ensure our morning commutes are an absolute breeze, and we don’t need to (swallows vomit) take transit or (dry heaves) ride a bike.

  • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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    3 months ago

    Making return-to-office mandates illegal would take a bite out of traffic congestion without putting people out of work or requiring any kind of monetary investment. Ford would never do that, however. I expect his friend-circle includes people who own office buildings in Toronto.

    • Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Right but you keep bringing up a problem I find with the anti car crowd, they don’t consider poor or working class people. Work from home, office mandates? That’s upper middle class shit. What do you suggest for a person who works labor. Construction. Different sites every week?

      Most anti car people are upper middle class or wealthy kids, raised in cities and have no regard or idea how poor or working class people live, and think we’re all in the same situation as a childless, single young person who lives downtown.

      I personally cannot strap my kids to my back. Get on a bike, ride them to school and daycare, then travel another 50km in winter on a fucking bicycle. And transit in my city is beyond pathetic, so less cars would first mean expending the transit system and budget and, that’ll be when pigs fly unfortunately

      • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        Poor people can’t drive. You can’t drive on minimum wage. You can’t have a place to live and drive on less than 50k. Driving is a privilege that many of us just don’t have. You act like that’s not the case, like we all just fucking shrivel up and die the moment we lose our license. You adapt. Life goes on. It’s not the end of the fucking world. Pull your head out of your ass. You’re not afraid you can’t work, literally millions of people in this province find a way to keep working. you’re afraid of a loss to your quality of life. And you don’t give a shit that your quality of life comes at the loss of other people’s quality of life.

        • Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Where I live it’s cheaper for me to own a car pay insurance and gas, than it is to pay for 4 monthly transit passes a month for my family

      • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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        3 months ago

        If we get the unnecessary middle-class commuter vehicles off the streets, the drop in congestion will make it easier for those people who do need to drive to do so, and make increasing the road capacity unnecessary. A solution doesn’t have to work for everyone to be useful, and yes, I agree that this one is obviously not practical or useful for someone who works construction, or retail, or in a warehouse or a garage or a restaurant or a lab or a factory or any other job that requires you to be on-site.

        I’m not anti-car. I own one. I drive. My physical condition and the location I live in pretty much require it. What I’m against is car trips that increase congestion and pollution without serving a practical purpose, and the constant increase in the number of overpriced lanes of asphalt around Toronto when vital transportation infrastructure in the rest of the province is falling apart. There’s a road a couple of hours’ drive north of here that gets a decent amount of traffic that they’re talking about downgrading to gravel because the municipalities that the province dumped it on can’t afford to repave it—it would literally cost several times the annual budget of the smaller town to repave their section. The railways are decaying to the point that the speed limits on the lines still in service are lower than 30km/h in some areas. The major east-west highway corridors through the province are riddled with potholes and disintegrating asphalt. And Ford wants to waste money on a Toronto commuter tunnel that we should not need. Diminishing the amount of traffic on the 401 would hopefully get him to move on to the next hare-braned wasteful idea. Eliminating all traffic on the 401 is obviously impractical (and not really necessary to avoid this particular piece of idiocy, since the road is already there).