Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[ijmorlan]

Have you ever driven between Guelph and KW between 7am and 8pm?

I assume you’re hinting that the road is extremely busy.

As a transit fan should know, road capacity is not the only way to move people. For far less money, an appropriate rail service could (probably) be provided on the existing railway right-of-way. This could be an LRT on a track parallel to the existing tracks (with passing tracks in the appropriate locations), or double-tracking of the line and using EMUs or DMUs to provide the service. For that matter, an expansion of bus service should be investigated.

Personally, I would widen the existing road to four lanes with a Jersey barrier down the middle and roundabouts to facilitate movements that are currently done as left turns. This would provide some additional capacity and improve safety at a small fraction of the cost of a superhighway. This would be in addition to a transit expansion as suggested above.

My understanding is that a large fraction of the traffic is commuters, so shifting them to transit is a perfectly reasonable thing to try to do. It’s not like the reason the road is full is primarily truck transportation, which will definitely not be affected by transit.

But of course none of this was even seriously investigated since a proper EA process was not conducted.

Why when the Region has the idea to build transit do we have to do a full investigation of alternatives, including nonsense like Aerobus and PRT (note: I happen to agree with the EA outcome not to build monorail, but I don’t consider monorail nonsense and would have been happy to have such a system built), but a road can be built with just a pro forma consideration of road routes? The EA should have to ask “what problem are we trying to solve?” and then consider multiple possible solutions.