Ten Old Mobility Questions for Toronto

Mobility Questions for Toronto:
Old and New

This section will shortly be recast in the form of an open Survey. For now we offer it as additional background and food for thought.

As indicated, a good next step after you have given this some thought, might be for you to click to the Toronto 2004 Guestbook to share your views with us all.

Ten Old Mobility Questions for Toronto

Do you want you and your family to own and drive cars as your principle form of day to day transportation in and around the city?
Do you believe that the present car-based system is posing a large scale public health and environment menace?
Do you want to continue to spend more time in traffic in your car, while you can see that each year it takes more time to get from Point A to Point B than last year?
Are you prepared to continue to pay for the "solution" to these problems massive chunks of your hard earned dollars on new heavy transportation infrastructure (urban highways, cloverleaf Interchanges:, road widening, new metros, and who knows what)- knowing however that all of this will at best take a decade or more to start to yield relief? And indeed perhaps not even then?
Are you aware of the full cost to owners of an average Canadian's automobile dependency in 2004?
No car? Well, do you want to hike some distance and then stand in the rain and snow waiting for a bus that will come when it can make it?
Is it a wise idea to pay heavy subsidies to public transport operators who are not offering "car-like" levels of service, or anything even remotely close to it?
Are you confident that these problems are receiving all the attention, inputs and resources that are needed to deal with these issues?
Or is some entirely new approach called for?
And by the way, is it the car itself you want? Or is the important thing perhaps the level of service, comforts, safety, flexibility, etc. that have come to be generally associated with them?

Hmm. Let's think about that.

Three New Mobility Questions for Toronto

Would you like to live in a city that offers all its citizens a range of transportation arrangements that together offer we might call "car-like" comfort and speed? Or better?
And live in a place with higher life quality, lower accident rates, cleaner air, more possibilities for safe cycling and agreeable walking, better contact with others and more convivial public spaces and events?
And, say, cut your transport costs by more than half without increasing public investment in the system as a whole?

Can this be achieved? At this point no one can give you a firm answer to that.

But before, during and after this year's first New Mobility Summit in Toronto, we are asking the question. And have a few ideas about how this might be achieved.

Join the 2004 New Mobility Summit in Toronto and help us explore how this might be done. Or at the very least to ask the questions.

Next step?

Click the Guestbook on the top menu and let us hear from you.