ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[Bytor]

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.

I'm suspecting that you don't know what the ridership of the 7 + 200 was before, and that you also didn't know what ridership of is now, until somebody mentioned it in this thread.

Now, I'm not hating on the ION in any way, I am very glad it was built

Yes, you are, because so much of what you say about it is just incorrect.

But it was under construction for years

Three years. How long did you think a big infrastructure project would take?

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.

That's why I said above that you probably didn't know the ridership before and after.

7 + 200 2018 July-December: 2,528,000
7 + ION 2019 July-December: 3,668,000

That's a 45% increase, year over year. Pretty significant, no?

It's as slow as a worm trying to crawl across a sidewalk on a sunny day in July

How fast did you think it was going to be? It was never going to have a top speed better than a bus, thanks to not getting caught in traffic and the wider stop spacing it still ends up being a little faster than the 200 was.

and it only covers a very very specific corridor of the city

So what? Each bus route only covers a "very very specific corridor of the city", too.

But guess what? The corridor that ION goes through happens to be the one where two-thirds of of all trips in Waterloo Region start or end (or both) every day.

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.

I've never compared ION to the 8, though I suspect that it's similar to comparing the ION to the 7. People claim the 7 is faster than the ION, but that's true over the distances where the ION's track deviates from the 7's route (i.e. around Mill and R&T stations) and only after 7pm in the evening when traffic congestion disappears.

Most importantly, it has yet to do anything meaningful in regards to developing affordable housing and access to employers.

Most jobs in K-W lay along the the K-W portion of the Central Transit Corridor that Stage 1 ION runs. It's reliability over the 7 and 200 and added capacity means it is easier to get to employers along that corridor by transit. For example, the old route 22 use to go from Williamsburg northeast to the old Charles Terminal. The new 22 now goes from Williamsburg to Block Line Station, and anybody taking it and transferring to ION to go to work in DTK now has a 5 minute shorter trip, just by the schedules. If the person worked in Uptown and had to transfer to the 200 or 7 from the 2 before, this new trip is about 10 minute quicker. Plus, the new 20 isn't getting stuck in traffic congestion like the old 20 did as it wound its way to DTK. That traffic congestion also meant that a lot of people doing the old 20→200/7 to work in Uptown and the the reverse to get home missed the 20 when the 200 or 7 was late and they would have to wait another 30 minutes before the next one.

That is clearly a meaningful development in 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.

As described above, It became easier right away.