Good Bus Service To The Suburbs

This page is [[under_construction?]] so it's on the ToDoList.

In a growing city, most inexpensive shelter -- both homes and apartments, will be found not downtown but out in the [[suburbs?]]. Without adequate bussing, people need [[cars?]] to live in [[inexpensive_shelter?]], which reduces the [[utility?]] of [[moving?]] there in the first place.

[[Bus_service?]] to the suburbs would also allow everyone to leave their cars at home, decreasing downtown [[traffic?]] and energy/carbon [[Energy_Footprint?|footprint]], and prepare society for [[future_forms_of_public_transit?]] which pollute even less than diesel buses.

So our growing city needs good bus service to the periphery:

• [[Enfield?]]
• [[Upper_Sackville?]]
• [[Sambro_via_Spryfield?]]
• [[Musquodboit_Harbour?]]
• [[Head_Of_St_Margaret's_Bay?]]

"Good" bus service means:

• that someone can get from the suburbs to the downtown in under an hour during [[business_hours?]], and
• within about an hour and a half the rest of the time, 24 hours a day, that is, a night bus service.

Night buses should run once an hour along the lines listed above. The night bus service will allow suburbanites to take part in the magic of the city without exorbitant [[taxi?]] costs to [[get_home?]] after.

Issues

One issue of [[Public_Transit?|public transit]] in [[North_America?]] involves our obsession with creating commercial, industrial and residential suburbs outside of the city center. It is easy to set up a star-model bus system, delivering people from the windy roads of the suburbs to the hub terminals in the center of town, but then transit times from those hubs back out to [[Dartmouth_Crossing?]] or [[Bayers_Lake?]] takes twice as long as going to the center of town.

Meanwhile, the suburbs are more or less uniformly one type of property: commercial, residential or industrial. The residential ones end up being very boring unless one can afford transit to the mall across town.

Another issue is that we don't live in a [[grid-shaped_city?]], for the most part. Making public transit that delivers people efficiently through a maze like [[Dartmouth?]] is quite a feat.

References

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