Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[danbrotherston]

We're not just talking about densely populated areas here.  And that's the point.  We're talking about a link between a lot of areas that will not be served well by transit for the foreseeable future.  

You're conflating two issues. You claimed that some areas are better to serve with cars. This is true, for very sparse rural areas, there isn't enough demand for transportation to serve with mass transit. Guelph and Kitchener are not sparse rural areas, their medium sized cities.

Now you claim that transit isn't an option because they're not well suited to them, but that isn't an inherent feature of the area, it is an intentional design choice we made. And one we're continuing to make. You're arguing, we must build a road, because we forced ourselves to build it years ago. We're arguing, we should stop forcing our future selves to build more roads. Which is on to your next point.

And once again, there's no new sprawl being encouraged here.  The areas served by the new highway 7 will be developed almost exactly the same regardless of if the new highway 7 is built or not - because new growth has to happen and the area between KW/Guelph has long been identified as a place its going to happen.

This is cart before the horse argument here, the highway enables a specific type of development, and the lack of transit prevents other types. This causes us to build more unsustainable sprawl. This has been true around highway developments across the province, the country, and beyond, and through time, since we started building highways.

To suggest that the highway will have no effect on what's built is vastly oversimplifying things. It might be that if we built nothing, those sprawling developments would get built and we'd be forced to build a highway anyway. But if we built transit instead, something different might get built, or if we built nothing, as before, those developments might not get built because people don't want to be stuck on old highway 7. We cannot know, but it is clear building a highway and not building transit, definitely does continue the pattern of development that got us here.