This is always a hot button issue in my city (Toronto), so I'm wondering if other people are happy with transit where they're living. While I mean to touch more on public transit, if you have more to say about roads (congestion, conditions, tolls, construction), then by all means go on.
You may want to touch on points like:
Coverage - Does your transit system reach where you need to go? Does it reach into the suburbs, or is it relatively short and poorly designed? Does your transit system reach your airport, or other regional transit systems?
- Cost - Do you feel like you pay a reasonable amount for the service provided? Do you pay for distance traveled, by ol' fashion cash, or by a refillable metro card? Do transfers cost extra, or come free?
- Modernism - Is your system modern feeling with automation on the trains, and in the stations, or does it feel like something out of the 1950s? Are your buses and cars newer, or something that belongs in a museum? Is the system accessible to the elderly and disabled passengers?
- Management - Are strikes over transit a common theme every year, or does everything just seem to push on without a hitch? Are the employees you encounter friendly and helpful, or rude and lazy? Is the transit run by a private company, the city / government, or a combination?
In Toronto, we're primarily served by one sole transit system in the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission). Although Toronto is a fairly large city (just over 6 mil metro, 2.6 mil city), with a ballooned population during the day from the suburbs, our transit system is very vanilla. We have three subway lines (70km) and one RT line. One subway line is relatively new, but built on population growth projections which have not been met, meaning the line is not used very often. The line also suffers from being a dead end (and short) and not linking up with the rest of the system on one end.
That said, we didn't jump on the chance decades ago to expand the subway line (mostly due to fighting in City Hall about how to move forward, and new mayors cancelling old projects), and now we're stuck.
We do have a massive bus and streetcar system, which helps the lack of subway lines. The buses have mostly been updated in the last few years to modern models, but we're still waiting on replacing our 30 year old streetcar fleet. LRTs are mostly what we have to look forward to in our transit's future, which is okay in my book. It's what we can afford, we don't make risky guesses with population growth in areas where population doesn't meet subway demands yet, and it's not sitting on our hands like we've done for years.
Another problem with the system is accessibility. Most of the 69 stations are not accessible for anyone that might have a tough time getting around. Few have elevators, many have escalators that consistently are under repair, and upkeep is not the best. Along with this comes the inability for the TTC to upgrade how they're run (we have no automation in the system, either at vehicle level, or at things as simple as the fare boxes); most of this stems from being supported by a very strong union that doesn't want to retire jobs.
The system is also expensive, costing $128 CAD for a metropass and $3 cash fare each way. You don't pay by zone in the system, but simply once you're on 'you're on' and once you're off 'you're off' (except for transfers which must be used ASAP). Much of this is because the city itself funds the TTC and we receive almost nothing from the Provincial level; Something unheard of for most transit systems.
Overall, I'm not that down on the system we have, but it's not a great piece of work to compare to even more similarly sized cities around the world. We screwed ourselves on subway expansion, and we've been slow to move forward in many areas. Hopefully in the coming years our planned expansions will actually happen and it will make the city much more livable.
