Downtown project directory

[danbrotherston]

When it comes time to build another line, spend more and make it truly rapid so it can fulfill the needs of people as much as it can. As it is, the ION is slow and weirdly engineered. It's like it was some beginner playing City Skylines trying to desperately build an LRT with little money.

As someone that was really deeply involved in the approval process for ION I think another $50M in cost would have killed it, and $100M certainly would have.

The options weren't ION vs a better designed LRT, the options were ION or some vague improvements to the 200 iXpress (a true BRT was never going to happen either).

I'm not happy about it, if I was dictator we'd have done better, but a decade ago Waterloo Region was a VERY different place. We got all that was politically feasible at the time. Every other Canadian of our size that's considered LRT has ended up with nothing.

In many cases the problem was not cost, but priority and competence. Most of my issues with the LRT could or even can be solved without spending much money, and most of those aren't even problems that would have cost any more to build the right way to start. A few of the issues would have added to the cost, I'm not sure how much, but at that point, it's an opinion how close it was to approval.

The point is well taken however, that political feasibility is a driving force.