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Comment on Expand North! So much room up there.

FireRetardant@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

One minor correction. The reaaonCanadians don’t drive is not because the weather sucks, Canadians drive so much because our country refuses to build real transit or walkability. Hell half our country is going to court because a few of our provincial premiers want building bike lanes to be illegal. There are other countries with similar climates to Canada where people don’t need to extensively rely on their car to live their daily life.

Id also say that the biggest factor to cost of living is cost of housing, which is largely related to our cities making it nearly impossible to build any housing that isnt detached single family homes with minimum lot sizes and set back requirements. This also reinforces the car dependancy

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Evkob@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Seriously, half the fucking country lives in the Québec City - Windsor corridor and we don’t even have a high speed train there?? It’s a political issue, not a geographical one.

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- FireRetardant@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  But Canada is “too big” for rail. Except of course all those railways 100 years ago that pretty much made this nation possible, or how nearly every city had trams in most neighborhoods.
  
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  - TheSaddestMan@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Isn’t there an HST project’s route being prospected between Calgary and Edmonton?
    
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merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I agree that Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit. But, I still think winter has a lot to do with that.

Mass transit means waiting outside for a bus or tram, and waiting outside when it’s either +35 or -30 sucks. Many people will prefer cars for that reason. It isn’t the only factor, but it is definitely a factor.

As for bike lanes, winter is a major factor. It’s certainly possible to bike in the winter, I’ve done it for many years, but it isn’t easy. In Canada as it exists now, biking in winter means biking in traffic most of the time. Bike lanes exist, but often in winter they just shove the snow to the side of the road and block the bike lanes. I don’t know of anywhere in Canada where they clear bike lanes as a priority. That could be done. It is done in some places in Finland, for example. But, there’s a catch 22. It’s not worth it to clear the bike lanes because there aren’t enough winter bikers; there aren’t enough winter bikers because it’s dangerous and unpleasant to bike during winter because they don’t clear the bike lanes.

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- Zagorath@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  As for bike lanes, winter is a major factor.
  
  Yawn
  
  But actually, even in Canada. And even with bike share programs.
  
  So actually:
  
  Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit [and bike lanes]
  
  Is all you need. End of post.
  
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  - merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    The video says that there were more than 500,000 bike share trips in Toronto in the winter months. Let’s be conservative and say that “the winter months” are just December, January and February. The reality is that there’s ice on the ground until May pretty often, but let’s just pretend it’s 500,000 trips in 3 months to make the numbers seem as big as possible.
    
    Is that big? Not really, 500,000 trips in 3 months is 167,000 trips per month. Meanwhile in the summer it’s 1 million trips per month. So, cycling drops by a factor of at least 6 in the winter. That’s massive.
    
    And yes, I’ve watched that Not Just Bikes video. It makes the point that in order for people to bike in the winter, you need massive infrastructure that Canada refuses to spend on. The city in question in the video, Oulu, makes it a priority to clear the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall. Theoretically could that be done in every rich city in the world? Sure. Is it realistic it will ever happen anywhere in Canada? Doubtful.
    
    I stand by what I said, “winter is a major factor”. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to commit to clearing all the bike routes within 3 hours of a 2 cm snowfall? You could argue that the cost is worth it, and that the cost is smaller than doing similar things for cars, but it remains a major factor.
    
    Besides, it wouldn’t even make sense to have snow clearing like Oulu unless they first built a dedicated bike network for the city. There’s no point in just clearing the “bike lanes” which are just a tiny strip of pavement next to the gutter.
    
    Canadian cities aren’t doing enough to build mass transit and bike lanes. But, even if they did, the weather sucks in the winter. And Oulu, is colder than Toronto. But it’s slightly warmer than Ottawa and Montreal, and significantly warmer than Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary. So, even if you replicated all the bike lanes from Oulu, committed to clearing the snow as quickly as they do in Oulu and made cars and fuel as expensive as they are in Europe, Canada would probably have nowhere near the number of winter bikers as Oulu per capita. Canada is much colder, cities are designed around cars, and people have “car brain”.
    
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- FireRetardant@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  All the problems you’ve described are infrastructure abd policy problems We can build climate controlled mass transit stations. We can maintain separated and safe bicycle networks in the winter. We can clear pedestrian pathways of snow instead of plowing the car lane snow onto them. Its all policy and infrastructure. If you make transit the fastest while being convenient and clean, people will use it over cars because it takes less time, not everyone, but certainly enough to make it worth it.
  
  We can’t fairly use the there are no cyclists now argument because we haven’t given them any real options. We need to provide safe and effecient cycling infrastructure to truly see how many people would prefer to bike. If a city had no roads you could make the argument not to build any roads because nobody drives anyway.
  
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- TheSaddestMan@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s not just that. Trains don’t run as well or brake as efficiently in cold weather, they have slippery metal rails for a reason. That’s why we switched to cars and trucks too readily, and as sad as that is, I think we might need electric cars more than Americans ever needed any cars.
  
  (That said, electric cars should be thanks to electrified smartroads, not stuffing the car itself full of computer hardware.)
  
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  - FireRetardant@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Do you have a source for this? Our cargo trains run through some pretty frigid winters. Many European countries have a similar climate and they have trains. Aren’t the swiss famous for sending trains through snowy mountains?
    
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