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Few with a choice will do it. Your scenario is played out all over various planned communities like Columbia, and in lots of towns in Northern New Jersey where I live (where it is fashionable to create, recreate, or rehabilitate downtowns). People still drive from the residential sections. Partially because people don't just go to their own town's downtown, partially because even at dense suburban densities, there just aren't enough people within walking distance.
Transit tends not to work well unless your town is linear. In order to cover an area, bus routes have to wind all over the place and end up taking forever. And of course the (non-commute) ridership is low so the buses will be infrequent as well. And buses are terrible for grocery shopping.
The preferred alternative to driving in Red Bank or South Orange or Montclair or Morristown is walking - not transit.
Most of the towns just aren't big enough to support regular transit service, if NJ or those towns felt like spending the money (and some of those towns do pay for jitney services but only during rush hour and as a connection to the train station) they could have fairly frequent jitney service with 2 or 3 routes capturing a lot of trips to downtown. But usually, parking isn't enough of an issue to demand it, despite how much people like to complain about it.
The parts of NJ closer to NYC look dense enough to support relatively good bus transit though, is there no regional (county or state-wide) bus service? It could connect the various town centres, job centres, shopping malls, and residential neighbourhoods in between.
It seems like Quebec suburbs are often garage optional. They aren't as dense as those of Toronto, but I wonder how come they often don't have any. About 1/4 of the homes in this new neighbourhood lack a garage. Boisbriand, QC - Google Maps
The only new suburban developments I can think of in the GTA that have no garages are a few clusters of homes in Brampton. According to one real estate listing, these are quads... and based on the fact that the unit advertised was on 2 floors+basement, it sounds like the units would be in each of the four corners of the structure. This hypothesis gets some confirmation from a few roofs where one corner of the roof has different coloured shingles. These quads have two double driveways that can fit 8-12 cars. Since I guess the owners of the front units don't want to have their only yard space next to a parking lot, the front yards are fenced off from the driveways.
The parts of NJ closer to NYC look dense enough to support relatively good bus transit though, is there no regional (county or state-wide) bus service? It could connect the various town centres, job centres, shopping malls, and residential neighbourhoods in between.
Sure. And then it'd take you an hour to get from South Orange to Montclair (plus walking time on either end) when you could have driven it in 10-15 minutes. There are plenty of bus routes all over NJ, but in general for getting from one point in NJ to another outside Hudson County, people who can afford a car drive.
It's not unusual for suburban communities to have a rail station, but little or no local transit. From the point of a larger transit system, local service within a low density suburb is not going to generate much ridership. They might run a bus along a main highway going through the town. So if the town wants more local service it's going to have to pay for it. Curvilinear roads are bad for transit, my question is why do they exist on dead flat terrain? They were developed to deal with hills.
Another consequence of the transit pattern is that the train station/town center area is really the place to densify if the town wants to do that, it's the place where a walking and transit based lifestyle is most viable. Typically in those circumstances, residents will want to own cars, but not as many as people living out in the town.
Sure. And then it'd take you an hour to get from South Orange to Montclair (plus walking time on either end) when you could have driven it in 10-15 minutes. There are plenty of bus routes all over NJ, but in general for getting from one point in NJ to another outside Hudson County, people who can afford a car drive.
Sounds like the bus routes connecting South Orange and Montclair aren't very good. Some of Toronto's suburban bus routes will cover that kind of distance in under 30 minutes. Actually, looking at the google maps transit directions, only 32 minutes would be spent on the bus, and the distance travelled is about 20% than by car due to the non-direct route via Broomfield College. So 30 minutes is not unfeasible if it is deemed important to connect these places with a direct bus route. Even if you don't have a direct bus route though, more frequent bus service would reduce wait times greatly, so the transfer would be such a hassle and you could still make the trip in under 40 minutes. Google also says it takes more time to drive that distance, 18 minutes even without traffic.
I'm not really familiar with NJ's bus network, in some cases, reconfiguring the bus service can reduce the need for transfers, although that depends on where there's demand. More frequent transit service would obviously mean higher operating costs, which is difficult to justify without increased ridership. Rising gas prices, worse congestion and planning around transit (both rail and bus) could help generate that increased ridership, leading to a virtuous cycle of frequency increases/more routes leading to further increases in ridership.
I'm not really familiar with NJ's bus network, in some cases, reconfiguring the bus service can reduce the need for transfers, although that depends on where there's demand. More frequent transit service would obviously mean higher operating costs, which is difficult to justify without increased ridership. Rising gas prices, worse congestion and planning around transit (both rail and bus) could help generate that increased ridership, leading to a virtuous cycle of frequency increases/more routes leading to further increases in ridership.
North Jersey's transit system is a mostly hub-and-spoke network that uses Newark, Hoboken or NYC as the hub. Going from spoke to spoke can be time consuming because you usually have to transfer - but it definitely could be better.
I tend to agree that there's not enough demand to go from a place like South Orange to a place like Montclair to justify increased service. There are just too many small towns like that and you can't link them all by bus. To be fair, if you made the trip during rush hour you could do it in as little as 35 minutes - vs. 30 minutes in a car at the same time of day. The bus trip swells to an hour when you have to wait 20 minutes to transfer between buses.
There are just too many small towns like that and you can't link them all by bus.
Which is kind of the point.
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