Many CTrain passengers travel to and from suburban stations on feeder bus routes that wind their way through surrounding neighbourhoods. Another popular option is a park and ride lot, in which commuters drive or bike to a station by car or bicycle and then transfer to a CTrain to complete their journey. Alternatively, some CTrain passengers disembark at drop-off zones from vehicles travelling elsewhere; because commuters at the time of the system's opening were sometimes conveyed by their spouses, these zones were once branded as Kiss and Ride areas. Ridership The CTrain's high ridership rate and cost effectiveness can be attributed to a number of factors. The nature of Calgary itself has encouraged CTrain use. Calgary has grown into the second largest head office city in Canada, with a very dense downtown business district. Most of the head offices are crowded into about of land in the downtown core. In the last half century the population of Calgary has grown dramatically, outpacing the ability of roads to transport people into the city centre, while the central business district has grown up vertically rather than spread out into the suburbs. Historically, Calgary residents, particularly its influential inner city community associations, voted against proposals to build major freeways into its city centre, forcing new commuters to use transit as their numbers increased while downtown street and freeway capacity remained the same. City planners limited the number of parking spaces in the downtown core since the narrow downtown streets could not allow more traffic to park. At the same time, Calgary's maturation as a globally influential head office city caused many surface parking lots to be replaced by new skyscrapers, which increased office workers while reducing parking spaces. This eventually made it prohibitively expensive for most people to park downtown. The shortage of downtown parking caused fees to become among the most expensive in North America. As a result, in 2012 50% of Calgary's 120,000 downtown workers used Calgary Transit to get to work, with a long-term goal of growing that proportion to 60% of downtown workers. Forward planning for the CTrain played an important role. Although the light rail system was not chosen until 1976, the city planners had proactively reserved transit corridors for some form of high capacity transport during the 1960s, and the right-of-ways for the system were reserved when Calgary's population was less than 500,000, whereas today it is