I beleive part of the problem with migrating students is London Transit
I have been a customer of London Transit for many of the 50 years I have lived here. London Transit is bursting at the seams, London can simply not grow any longer with the current strategy.
When compared to other cities, such as Toronto, Hamilton, Niagara Falls and even Lindsay, our transit system is abhorrent! Many major routes still run at half hour increments. For instance, to make it downtown for 9:00 am to be to work from where I live, I have to catch the # 14 Highbury at 8:04, and transfer to the #13A Wellington at 8:10. God forbid the driver is late on the # 14, if so, you have to wait until 8:20 for the 13A, which puts you downtown right at 9:00 am and leaves no time to actually walk to the office!
I have another trip that requires both the #14 east, to transfer at Highbury and Hamilton Road to the #4 Hamilton Road bus. If a connection is missed, this can take more than an hour for a 10 minute trip by car!
How can we convince young people to stay in a community that, in essence, forcing you to buy a vehicle?
Wendy Thomsen
shared this idea
-
Kevin Yaraskavitch commented
I can walk to my house from downtown faster than the bus can take me there... and its about a 50 minute walk. Sad. The LTC is broken and we need alternatives.
Instead of the city council pushing developers to the outskirts of town, it should allow renewal within the city to meet our modern needs. Time and time again, council turns down medium density housing close to the university. This means that the city deprives students of affordable housing and a short, healthy walk or bike ride to school. With more students living close to campus, higher density housing can take traffic off the road making commuting more enjoyable for everyone.
Expanding mass transit won't make our city healthier, buses pollute our air and they deprive people of light exercise on the way to their destination. Expanding transit won't make us wealthier, the LTC already requires a 20k subsidy per year just to keep running; if we expand the LTC, it will only be more. Certainly, it won't make us wiser to make such a poor decision.
-
Londonstudent commented
Yeah its the reason I live so close to downtown, for a city with no interior highways, London is obsessed with the car. I know I am leaving London once I am finished school for basically this reason, I can't afford a car nor do I want one(as much as I LOVE driving) Transit is the way of the future, the car is a dying technology, London needs to realize this.
-
Carefulspider
commented
I have been in London for almost 10 years now and I feel in many ways it's great for a small city. The transit could be improved though. Why do many of the bus routes need to go downtown at all? Why not have east/west and north south routes which take people to more workplaces? The industrial areas are not even serviced for the most part. It would seem that transit should get people to work as well as downtown, the malls, university and college. This issue doesn't even seem to be on City Hall's radar at all and that's a shame.
-
Jack Tripper
commented
This city is a joke. Without a car, you're pretty much SOL. Either relegated to minimum wage jobs that are completely dead end, or working for a temp service that steals half your wages. And even then with the latter, many of their jobs only pay minimum wages(or that pay barely past it) AND require a car.
What is the motivation to stay here? Dr. Oeteker is building a plant way out in the middle of nowhere. The Hanwha plant, you need a car to work at, as well as the Cakerie as well.
Even the route that service the industrial park out in Newbold area, it is basically useless. - If you start at 7am, there's no way you can make it there on time for a day shift. An afternoon, you can get there, but how the heck do you get home? And nights, you can get home from there, but how do you get to work? Walk? That's not realistic. How does that help anyone really?
I'm still very much annoyed by all the "out of service" buses we see downtown at rush hour, when there's only a few buses on, and we're packed in like sardines.