(07-04-2019, 11:50 AM)Rainrider22 Wrote: Just finished reading another horrible and negative opinion piece by Peter Taylor who always has to qualify himself as the contributing editor at Maclean's magazine (like this should make his opinion more valid)
Every author in the Record (and many other publications) has a brief description which appears at the head or foot of their articles. His is hardly atypical.
Other than that, yeah, it’s a pretty dumb article. The headline point is actually true: we can’t really tell yet how successful it is; we’ll see what ridership both on Ion and on the whole public transit system is around the end of the year. But the overall tone has the same passive-aggressive negativity that we all know and love from Jeff Outhit’s articles.
He should have left out that stupid “mall-to-mall” phrase: it’s idiotic.
Also I have to disagree with the quoted planning professor and others who say the same thing, that Ion is not to move people but to shape development patterns. It can only shape development patterns if it moves people. The fact that it can shape development patterns is a reason to build it even if current ridership doesn’t truly justify an LRT rather than a bus, but even there the purpose of building it is to move lots of people in the future who choose where to live partly because LRT is available.