ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

Hope this forum doesn't victim blame or jump to conclusions, though, as it likes to do when it comes to 4+ wheel vehicles hitting people or inanimate objects like steel signs. We'll know when we're settled they're alive + well and subsequent investigations are concluded. Medical privacy and similar mean we don't really know who smashed down a centre island yield sign and curb hopped nor misjudged a turning radii (nor this, should parties really try to hide the news) so it's impossible to shift blame. Quite often it doesn't even matter if a pedestrian hit knows they should not be, say, jaywalking...but it happens...so it wouldn't be fair to say "whoever was hit should have crossed where they should have". Regardless of outcome it should have been designed in a way to not allow the potentiality in the first place (one reason why subway systems are now putting walls on platforms, for example).

That is infeasible. You talk about grade separation as if it’s a minor tweak to the design, like having heated platforms. It’s not.

And in any case, it makes no sense to spend a huge amount of money grade separating the system to save one life per year (or whatever; probably not even that many) when you could save many more lives by building more LRT lines similar to the one we have and getting more traffic out of cars.

More fundamentally, you cannot make the world safe. There are situations in which one can feasibly eliminate classes of hazard. For example, machinery that takes both hands to activate, ensuring that one does not accidentally amputate ones other hand. There are other situations where similar preventive measures are either infeasible or outright impossible.

This is the thing that pisses me off the most.

People even on our councils complain that costs are their main obstacle. But it's self delusion. Money is barely an obstacle. It's an excuse sometimes, but when there's something we want to do, magically there's money for that.

Instead, it's political expediency that's the obstacle. You see it today on Lancaster, with Mayor Berry arguing against closing the highway ramps. There's no lack of money, there's a lack of political will to make meaningful changes.

On the LRT, the biggest thing that would make the LRT safer is closing some of the intersections in Midtown... But again, it's not a lack of money, those intersections were expensive to build, it would have been cheaper to remove them from the plan originally, and yet, here we are with a less safe, more expensive system.

This is why people keep going on about elevation. Because certain people perceive elevation to be 'free' in the political sense, even if it costs a ton of money. Of course, the only reason it's perceived as "free" politically is because those who would be impacted by elevating the system (you know, the passengers) have almost no political agency.