ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

I personally think that Victoria North/Highland would be better served by installing BRT corridors with proper traffic signal priority measures than by adding LRT. I'm no traffic planner, but I think the benefits that could be achieved by moving our buses more efficiently along these corridors would be more meaningful than losing right-of-way space to an LRT and squishing the local bus routes into the remaining single lane with personal vehicles. Then maybe after 50-75 years or so, we could revisit the corridor and install a raised platform for an LRT or equivalent if necessitated.

Of course, this is (probably) moot until the new highway 7 is installed. I can't see the Region giving up road space in this corridor to transit projects until that happens. In the short term, I think the priority should be to efficiently move buses through the congested stretch of Victoria, in and out of the transit terminal once it's built.

If you want efficiency then you want an LRT instead of a BRT. The only place that BRTs make sense is routes where you know it's going to take a route a really, really long time to get over that tipping point where LRTs become cheaper per passenger ride than BRTs.

In the fall of 2019 after ION started running with it's 25,000 average weekday riders was running at (by my calculations dividing operating costs by known ridership) $3.10/ride compared to the GRT bus average of $4.75/ride.

BRT is basically just buses. If we used BRT sensibly, BRT would have advantages like buses.

E.g., in our congested core, we built dedicated bus lanes to ensure buses moved swiftly past traffic, but then had the flexibility in the periphery to serve many routes.

The way we ACTUALLY do BRT is backwards, we build BRT lanes in the periphery where they don't really help much, but reduce flexibility, then force buses to share traffic in the congested core.

A pessimal policy....

LRT is good because it forces us not be pessimal.