One of the things that’s really hard for our generation to wrap our heads around is that until quite recently, the US had such a severe housing surplus that homes were literally being abandoned because nobody wanted to live in them in big cities all over the country, incl NYC 1/ People obviously know about places like Detroit but take Charlotte St in the Bronx (made famous by Jimmy Carter visit). It had apartment buildings that were abandoned & burned out. Was rebuilt as suburban style houses. Nobody could imagine there’d ever be demand for apartments 2/

Well this is the day I've been awaiting a long time! The deal is signed to move forward on GO Rail Expansion and Electrification. It's a pretty high-powered consortium. Who better than Deutsche Bahn to bring S-Bahn to North America? infrastructureontario.ca/Partner-Select… Check out our @TorontoRBOT report for an idea of what this kind of major regional rail expansion could look like. bot.com/Portals/0/PDFs…

Since our @TorontoRBOT fare plan is getting discussed, I thought it would make sense to do a review of what it actually entails in a short thread. You can read the details all here: bot.com/Portals/0/Tran… The key to it is that nobody ever pays for less than 2 zones, meaning that since Toronto is split into 2 zones, all TTC riders keep the same flat fare they pay today.

So @GovKathyHochul apparently made link today btw Interborough and Cross-Harbour Freight tunnel. This actually could make some sense. A short thread... The Cross-Harbour Freight Tunnel has long been proposed (esp by @RepJerryNadler), but it's hard to make work since it's a multi-billion $$ project and freight rail traffic to NYC is very limited for many reasons.

Continuing with the old plans theme but moving across the continent, here is a plan for regional rapid transit in the Bay Area from 1955. Would’ve done a lot more to serve the areas that became major employment centers. Here are travel times in 1955 and if the proposed system were built.

Before I finally have to return these to the library, I thought I’d tweet some images from these old reports, like these maps of old plans collected for the Metro Toronto Transportation Plan Review in 1973. Here is a map of the master plan from 1943. The 43 plan already had an extensive freeway network, as well as the familiar Yonge, University, and Bloor (west) subway. The latter would’ve been shared with a freeway along Bloor, a concept which wasn’t finally dropped till the 50s.

This is a really interesting and well-made point about the potential of rail to replace certain types of air travel, but there are some key points that need to be taken into account to make that happen. A thread:

https://twitter.com/RM_Transit/status/1418553775518855169

The traditional thinking is that rail can be competitive with air when a trip takes less than 3 hours (sometimes extended to 4 now given tougher airport security). That means taking market share, but it generally doesn't mean replacing flights entirely. 2/

A thread about some of the issues raised by Torontonians on the @voxdotcom video. I ride TTC and, believe me, I know its limitations. But as these maps show, the level of service in suburban Toronto is fundamentally different from similar US places. 1/
In most US cities, many routes in places that look like Scarborough and Etobicoke really do run once an hour, stop around 7pm, and don’t run at all on Sunday. That’s a completely different world from anywhere in Toronto. 2/ bloomberg.com/news/features/…