DONT BRING NUANCE AND LOGIC TO A SENSELESS FEELINGS-BAITING POST! It doesn’t MATTER the city layout over top of it, the context of rapid and rampant industrialization in China, or something as inconsequential as number of people!
Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Chengdu is the capital city of the Chinese province of Sichuan. With a population of 20,937,757 at the 2020 census
Toronto is the most populous city in Canada and the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a population of 2,794,356 in 2021
TheCleric@lemmy.org 2 days ago
pyre@lemmy.world 2 days ago
i don’t understand your reasoning here. are you saying that Toronto hasn’t needed more subway lines than a couple extensions in 15 years? how does the number of people affect the lines? i would think it should affect the number of trains and trips. the lines would be more about where people live and want to go, no?
tomi000@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Its sarcasm
pyre@lemmy.world 2 days ago
i know. I was addressing the point you’re making not the literal text.
poopkins@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Reading past your sarcasm, you’re suggesting that it’s better to have reduced public transit options than investing into them. I’m curious to hear your reasoning to argue that.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Having 7.5x the population means having more funds available for building expensive subway lines. Having more population also necessitates more of the transit to be via subway or rail, as opposed to buses which are slower and have other issues, but way cheaper than rail or subway.
Toronto, having less population, invests less in the most expensive solution that’s best for the densest cities, but still also invests in light rail and bus networks.
I was born in a town of <10k. We had buses and nothing else. Capital city of my country has a population of ~300k - has rail and trams in addition to buses. Capital city of the country just north of us a bigger population in the metro area than our entire country - 1.6 million vs 1.3 million. They have metro lines. Slightly over half the population of Toronto, slightly over half the total length of metro lines. Toronto is also building an extra 3 lines in addition to the current 3, nearly doubling total length of lines when it’s done.
Now Chengdu vs Toronto: 7.5x the population, 9x the rail lines (by length). Is Toronto really doing so badly? I would say that the bigger you get with cities, the need for high density transport lines actually rises faster than city growth. Maybe not quadratic, but definitely not linear. n log n maybe?
TheCleric@lemmy.org 1 day ago
No im not. You’re just seeing the issue-as-it-is as binary. I’m saying it’s bad to ignore all context to make a cheap point, even if your point is good. There are a billion ways to make a good point. Why choose a bad one.
poopkins@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s odd to me to take objection to a post making a bad point by making a sarcastic statement that was open to misinterpretation. The thread invites a discourse about building better cities and yet, in classic Lemmy fashion, it’s just about semantics.
napkin2020@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Not bad… With how things are going, if Mamdani wins, I could see NYC turning into a progressive city-state of sorts that people from the rest of the country will flock to for refuge.
With no more funding from the federal government, the differences between states are going to start getting much larger and blue states (and in cases like NYC large metro areas) are going to need to step up and fill in the gaps. It’s going to be rough.
poopkins@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What is the required population threshold for investing into public transit? Above 3 million and below 20 million, it seems, but can you be more specific?
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Why is it my job to provide policy? Can you be more specific?
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Other comments have pointed out that Toronto also has a light rail system and other solutions. This post shows just the metro systems of both cities. Maybe when there’s an order of magnitude difference in population, the exact transit solutions needed differ?
zockerr@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Meanwhile Hamburg, Germany with only 1.8 Million: 1000003619
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Kind of misleading. That’s metro+light rail. Above ground light rail is massively cheaper to build than subways.
tomi000@lemmy.world 2 days ago
How is it misleading? The post says ‘public transit’ and both are.
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
You mean that that is all the public transport in Toronto, combined?!
DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Still gets you places almost the same. Just have to have the foresight to leave space for it above ground.
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
Sure. I simply point out that developing above ground rails much cheaper. I’m not criticizing. I’m all for nay kind of public transport, and electric car and moto sharing.
JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Someone should let the leadership of Toronto know, they keep increasing costs with having it go underground
Flatfire@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
We have two LRT lines opening in short order. Both the eglinton crosstown and finch west. They’re also actively working to make all the Line 2 stations accessible by way of adding elevators where the designers in the 1960s saw no need for them. Believe it or not, they’re aware, but the TTC fights more than just a budget when trying to implement these things.
Besides NIMBYs, there’s the rapid expansion of the GTA to consider, which has led to either a redevelopment of land or a requirement for mass transit in places that were developed 20 years ago without consideration for it. As densification occurs, it is both more required, but more logistically complicated. The current municipal gov does genuinely seem interested in fixing this, but doing so is kind of a nightmare without the funding to buy property and redevelop entire civic centers. Add to the fact that the provincial government seems to wage its own war against changes to anything that would affect a car’s right of way and the downtown suddenly becomes this unchangeable monolith.
Then there’s the bonus factors of Bombardier, the supplier of basically every train for every LRT or Subway line in Canada, the fact that Toronto is actually a collection of smaller municipal regions with their own concerns and challenges, and that they’re also still trying to add ATC to all of Line 2 in order to replace the aging trains there. It becomes pretty clear that building out an entirely new transit system under the directive of your federal government with next to unlimited funding is probably a lot easier than reworking a 60 year old subway network that had vastly different aspirations than now.
China runs the benefit of uniform prioritization of these networks, in places that had no previous infrastructure to contend with. They aren’t currently splitting a budget between maintaining/retrofitting 60 year old subway lines, stations and cars. I’d be more interested in see if they were able to continue this kind of buildout in 30 years, or if they end up facing a lot of the same logistical challenges.