(12-01-2020, 10:34 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(12-01-2020, 10:26 PM)ac3r Wrote: It is definitely able to handle the demand. The thing is empty half of the time, even before SARS-CoV-2 disrupted everything. According to Keolis the LRT only carries 25'000 people per day on average. In terms of a rapid transit system (and specifically one that is serving a region of over 600'000+ people! - Nürnberg, Germany for example, is roughly the same size as us even even denser yet it has 3 subway lines, 5 streetcar/LRT lines, 4 S-bahn lines and a million bus routes) it's so far an absolute failure in terms of ridership. Even that number is quite ambiguous since they only announced that in a recent press release in regards to the ION winning a national award. Will ridership go up? I have no doubt, but it's reaching veeeeeeerrryyy far to paint the ION as an astounding success.
The LRT has been an unambiguous success in terms of ridership--before COVID--it was exceeding all ridership targets.
It not being full, does not make it a failure. Nurnberg Germany is a completely different city, it is entirely unfair to compare a city like that to our city which has just built it's first rapid transit line, that was operating only a year.
Saying it's a failure because 100,000 people didn't sell their cars the moment it was built is absurd, change takes time, but that change was happening far more rapidly as a result of the LRT than it was before, and more, it was happening faster than it was expected to as a result of the LRT.
Targets set by who, though? Targets don't mean much when they're made by the same business owners and politicians hoping to sell you a product. I could care less if the region and GranLinq set a random target and keep moving the goal post to make it sound like it was a resounding success. Now, I'm not hating on the ION in any way, I am very glad it was built - I hate cars and I wish we could get most places in the city without having to rely on one. I've worked for the Region of Waterloo on architectural and urban planning projects so I love the fact we finally did this because in many ways it has benefitted people. But it was under construction for years and yet the ridership isn't all that much more significant than it was when we only had the 7 and various iXpress routes doing more or less the exact same route. It's as slow as a worm trying to crawl across a sidewalk on a sunny day in July and it only covers a very very specific corridor of the city and is ultimately not that much faster than the bus routes it replaced - for me, it takes me less time to take the 8 downtown as it does the LRT and the route is almost virtually the same in terms of distance.
Most importantly, it has yet to do anything meaningful in regards to developing affordable housing and access to employers. Yeah it's easy to say "well don't worry, it's still new, the poor will love it one day" but people who live pay cheque to pay cheque don't give a shit how easy it might be to get to work in 5-10 years.