Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[Bytor]

Bus route ridership is only one, very tiny part of the puzzle. They didn't built the entire LRT just because of the 7/8/200 routes being full, it was first and foremost built with the design of transit oriented development and promoting density for the long term health of the urban fabric of the region itself. It just so happened that those busy bus routes followed the "spine" that runs through all 3 cities and that the LRT logically followed that.

Of course, but you don't just target a random area as your next densification project and build an LRT there even though it would hardly get any riders and be decades before it grows enough to give you a lower operating cost per ride than a bus route.

Might Ottawa St. someday have dense enough residential nodes and big enough employment nodes along it to warrant an LRT? Possibly. But right now Highland/Victoria beats it in every way.

Ottawa St. S has problems like it's catchment area for possible stations being constrained by the Expressway to the north. Highland Rd's current mixture of residential development is also 50% more dense than either Ottawa North or South. Residential areas redevelop more slowly than the low-density commercial we currently see out Victoria St. N. With smart rezoning focusing on mixed-use commercial, oriented to things like a Canadian Tire in the podium instead of as a big box store, it would redevelop much faster than the pedestrian-hostile big-box parkas like Sunrise or Laurentian and more extensively than Ottawa St. could do in the same time frame.