Raise the Hammer

it's nice to be able to nitpick the part of a comment that supports your argument.

haveacow is exactly right when presenting the choices of healthcare workers in terms of transit. transit sucks on off peak hours, when many healthcare workers start and end shifts. on peak schedules the bus service is not very good to this location, and people propose a 1 km walk/bike to perhaps mitigate this a bit. now consider what happens on a weekend night. your commute suddenly has skyrocketed, and good luck if you don't end your shift right on time and get out to the stop. miss one bus and you may be stuck waiting 30 mins for the next one. have a connecting bus? well...

lets say you get on the ol' number 2 on time. it's packed again! you can spend your ride listening to 15 different people screaming into their cell phones. you make every single stop and it takes forever. it's probably insanely hot (always so hot...)

you can avoid all that if you take a sobi or walk down to/from main or king. the bike racks are usually well stocked there fortunately. this had pitfalls related to the crappy bike infrastructure we have already noted, but also worsens with winter.

taking a sobi from a distant parking lot works for the first 5 people who get the bikes i guess. there are not many stations in this area compared to the core. i think walking is just fine and people should do this but there is a fear (much of which is unjustified, some of it is) of doing so at night.

i'm not defending building more parking lots, this decision was the correct one and i applaud these efforts. i never drove to the general when i worked there, but i can understand most people would. it's not the problem of HHS, why should they be expected to invest in public infrastructure and advocacy to any greater extent than the developers who are making boatloads of cash from the "renaissance" of the city? how does it make business sense for them to remove benefits that attract staff to work at their sites? unfortunately that is how hospitals run, business-like. blame capitalism i guess.

has hhs contributed to the car-centric environment of this neighbourhood? yes. has the city shown any efforts to mitigate this through increasing transit infrastructure and capacity along this very popular route? not really. i think the blame game is useless and unproductive, unless we blame the city and their devotion to auto-centric planning.