ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

"Who determined"...it doesn't matter who determined...if someone gives you requirements, and you can see that they are wrong, you should tell them about it...even if it isn't your job.  As Bob_McBob said, apathy is the problem.

Of course you can tell people about that. But if you have no authority to set the requirements, you can't change them. Same in my job, maybe also in yours.

I am not saying this was not a problem. I am simply asking whether it was the LRT planners at fault, or someone else. It's easy to blame the planning team, but were they the actual decision-makers?

I know that people like the idea of an ultimate authority is appealing to people, but in my experience it isn't usually reflective of actual decision making, at the scale our region operates (and the scale my company operates), virtually every decision is collaborative, there's not usually one person, there's dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, and I don't mean people working together, everyone is pulling just a little bit in their own direction. An organization functions better or worse depending on how much those folks are in sync, pulling in the same direction, and that's not a constant, it can be different for every decision. For cars, the region is all pulling in sync. For other infra, not so much.

You can even see it in our council, which is, intentionally not an authoritarian dictatorship, you have different councillors all with their own values trying to pull things a bit. Then listen to staff, the same thing is happening there.

So yeah, everyone has a little bit of power--some more than others, but most staff and most councillors are not pulling towards walkability or cycleability.