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Comment by jcroll | Hacker News Reader

I live in Toronto and the pilot project remains a very controversial decision basically pitting the interests of commuters against car drivers in what is for all intents and purposes a zero-sum game.

The next question is whether there's a solution where everyone wins and the most immediate idea is a subway running down that corridor. Of course, the amount of disruption that would bring to businesses already crying foul over the pilot project is a tough pill for any politician to swallow. Ultimately this is a lesson in failed urban planning as a subway built there decades ago before all the condos went up in this city would have alleviated issues for everyone involved.

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Why do you think this is a zero-sum game?

That's only if the number of car drivers is equal to transit riders + cyclists (and maybe some pedestrians).

Of course that equation is nowhere near equal. The entire reason behind the pilot is because transit vastly outnumbers car drivers.

If you can improve the situation for 10-100x as many people, then why wouldn't you? (all else being equal of course). I'm simplifying things, but I don't understand why you're implying equal footing to both sides.

It's like nominating a supreme court justice is a zero sum game. Is it really? Either way, you'll never convince both sides that one decision isn't a loser for them

According to this article prior to the change: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/why-all-the-fus...

it was 65,000 transit commuters per day vs 20,000 vehicles per day.

edit, here is the latest data from the city: https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/8fe2-King-... (sept/oct is not yet available which is unfortunate because the baseline is october 2017)

Yeah, thanks. 10-100x was a huge exaggeration but 2-3x is still a large benefit and worthwhile on its own.

It simply moved the traffic to the parallel streets thus worsening congesting in the city overall. The overall utilization of an expensive infrastructure is very low. The "440%" increase in cyclist is unlikely to equal the number of people moved through that corridor via motor vehicles.

It is simply untrue that the overall utilization of the infrastructure is low. Streetcars on King and Queen are usually jam-packed, unless you are in the far east and west ends. The bike lanes running east west on King, Adellaide, and other streets are very heavily used.

And it's true that most people who were driving won't trade in their cars for bikes, for various reasons. I am not sure how that factors in at all here.

It's not just car drivers, eleven restaurants in the area have closed since the pilot began. What do you do as a business owner when city is driving away your customers?

Restaurants close all the time. Are those closures due to the pilot? The city has provided numbers on receipts which don't show a huge effect. I'm not saying there's no causation here, but you can't just say 11 restaurants are closed and attribute them all to the pilot.

Correlation does not mean causation. Restaurants close all the time for myriad of different reasons. Do you have any data that can actually support a causal link here?

Those restaurants were already notorious tourist traps. The restaurants in the area that were any good still remain.

Cars driving by those places was not where they got their business. The city didn't reduce parking lot numbers in the area. They got their business from theatre-goers and other foot traffic.

One of the restaurant owners (who I won't name) decided it would be a worthy protest to place a large ice sculpture of a raised middle finger to pedestrians in the area, and the city at large. That came back to bite him in a serious way. He was already a disliked business owner. That seemed to seal it.

He drove his own business away, not the city. Another restaurant in the strip serving similar fare is still kicking... probably because they're not half bad and offer a better environment.

Dense urban centers is one place where I, normally an advocate for privately owned automobiles, think they do not make sense. Too many people in too small a space for everyone to have and use his own car.

I don't live in such an environment, and would never want to.

For the significant number of people that live in the area surrounding Toronto and work downtown it is sometimes the best option. Driving to work, including gas and parking, costs me only a few dollars more per day than taking the GO train and the TTC. It's also faster outside rush hour times and only slightly slower most of the time during rush hour. It might be an obvious choice in some metro areas but public transit in the GTA is not great.

Can it be a zero-sum game if you can usually switch 'sides' from driver to pedestrian/cyclist/transit user reasonably easily?

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