ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

This is some sort of priority that the city/region needs to move up somehow. Really, there should be two crossings, in my opinion, but at least one close to Food Basics.

You'd have thought the geniuses who planned all this in the first place would have thought of this scenario.  But alas, the elite don't disappoint.  

I think, for now, a good alternative would be is to have a shuttle bus doing a loop in that area.  Though I imagine that would be fairly expensive, even if you limited the hours, you're looking at probably $250,000/year still at least. I base that on an assumption of 12 hours a day for 5 days, and 10 hours for Saturday and Sunday, so 80-hours per week, which is 2 FT employees, plus bus expenses. Or alternatively, they could have an on-demand type of taxi service with some sort of micro-bus, privately run.

That sounds like an uncalled-for potshot at those who were doing the planning. As Canard writes, those who were planning were probably not familiar with the situation on the ground. This is why we do public consultations these days (and part of the reason it takes longer to build infrastructure here than in less-democratic countries). Unfortunately, certain demographics are used to not being consulted (because they usually aren't), so it takes effort from the whole of society to be inclusive.

I do agree that there should be a solution sooner rather than later. Shuttle buses and micro taxis sound like a good way to spend a bunch of money without necessarily getting good results. Would you want to wait for a shuttle bus? How do you call the micro taxi? Perhaps it would be less expensive to just pay for a crossing guard.

Between Regional staff and Grandlinq, I consider this a major screw-up. It doesn’t take a genius to glance at an aerial view, see the informal accesses, and notice that the plan so far leaves an enormously long stretch of track with no crossing. The various site visits that presumably preceded detailed design also should have turned up the knowledge of the existence of those informal accesses. The fact that those accesses were all de jure trespassing is irrelevant, and anybody who doesn’t understand that has no business being employed in planning.

And yes, there definitely should be two or even three crossings, not just one, and paved multi-use trails on both sides of the tracks all the way along. If this is infeasible now it is only because they screwed up earlier (e.g., because of the choice of the exact location of the tracks and buried hydro infrastructure, either of which would be very expensive to move now but which could have been trivially adjusted during planning). All of this should have been obvious to the people making the detailed decisions. I can excuse an initial draft by Grandlinq that ignored some of these considerations, but the fact that it wasn’t caught and corrected before construction is intolerable.

I think I’ve also seen suggestions that a grade-separated crossing should be considered. While this is not a bad idea, any suggestion that there is a safety problem with grade crossings is bogus. If that were actually believed to be true, we would have built an elevated system, possibly a monorail.