Obviously there is the housing crisis, but housing prices are crazy in most huge metros like this. The best way to combat this IMO is to make it easier to get into the city from outside so people can live further away without worse commutes. And the only way to accomplish this is to drastically improve the public transit in and out of the city.
I recently moved out of Markham, from my old place to union station it would be 1.5hr bus ride, a 1hr car ride with traffic, and a 20min car ride without traffic. Lowering that bus ride would directly lower the with traffic number too.
People are already commuting regularly from Kitchener, where housing also isn’t cheap. Agree that we need faster and better public transit, but Ontario as a whole is in a cost of living crisis that I don’t think better public transit is going to solve.
Yes, public transportation wil definitely help. But good luck trying to make policy changes that favor public transit
I feel like even if they had just prioritized the rail line growth in the early 2000s we’d be fine. Barrie is just starting to get their second line so there can be two way trains all day. All of the other Toronto suburbs need to have dedicated rail service accompanied by densification near those stations.
Barrie is also starting to get really expensive with regards to housing.
Explains why the mayor with an affordable housing plan got elected!
In my opinion, the problem is that for the past 50 years, we spent all our time to build beautiful subburbs and parking lots. The city has not expanded as much as it should have been and now, we reap the consequences of unsustainable cities.
Subburbs exists because the city generate a lot of wealth and yet, for some reason, we keep building big box store, big parking lots and single family houses.
I don’t think the solution is to build more or raise the minimum wage. The solution is to make the city denser and probably bulldoze the fuck out of the subburbs to actually make cities that have a high value per acres.
I see the Citadel has found a way to encourage the poor to leave
Economic think tank doesn’t realize that a two-bedroom apartment would probably be shared between two people.
The solution, as it always is, is to increase density everywhere. Increased density supports more transit, which decreases traffic and allows for faster commutes.
