ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

 The choice to build four lanes is a policy choice from engineers who like building four lane roads.

I'm definitely not an engineer or involved in this at all but I am curious about this:

Do engineers just design things with outdated doctrine and pass that on to politicians?

or: 

Do politicians make lazy demands for wide roads that engineers just go along with, and leave the costs to future politicians/generations?

If it is option 2, what's the point of having professionals that we are supposed to respect for their expertise? A politician might personally like a wasteful left-turn lane (or whatever), but I expect professionals to explain why it is a bad idea and for that to be adopted over the whims of a councillor.

I think it is largely the first. Although you might want to be clearer about "doctrine".

But FWIW...council isn't pushing back either.

Leaving aside the original discussion of road expansion and overbuilding, and looking at higher level policies, we built a transportation plan and so did the city of Waterloo recently, and despite climate emergencies, climate plans, and a full awareness of the issues, no staff member, no council member, and few members of the public were willing to even mention let alone question the underlying assumptions of those plans...that VMT increases over time. It is treated as a universal law of the world, as much as geometry or physics.

The next battle to fight with the region and council will be to accept that VMT increasing is not a natural law that policy must work around, but instead is a direct result of that policy, and can be changed by choosing different policy.

Ultimately, we could fight and force the region to be more fiscally responsible with road building and that wouldn't be a bad thing. The way we build roads is incredibly wasteful, even in a world where you plan for increasing VMT. But to me, it isn't worth fighting anymore, because its a "win the battle, lose the war" situation. The thing that must change to meaningfully change our policy is the underlying VMT assumption.