Highway 7 - Kitchener to Guelph

[panamaniac]

I don't know what this means. An environmental assessment was initiated 20 years ago, and approved in 2007.

I will confess I have not read that EA. But did it examine the possibility of building a transit network instead of a superhighway?

If not, it was not a proper EA process. An EA is supposed to examine alternatives, as was done with the LRT — in the early stages, they looked at monorail, BRT, LRT, and other options. I don’t remember if road expansion was an explicit option in the EA, but I do remember that there has been public discussion of the amount of road building that would be needed without the LRT.

The superhighway is extremely expensive. While I only mentioned an interurban from KW to Guelph, the money might have paid for both an interurban and improved transit access at the Guelph end, together with improvements to the existing road (much cheaper than a whole new superhighway). At our end of course it would connect to the transit hub and LRT. So the idea that transit can’t handle a significant fraction of the traffic needs justification. Note that it doesn’t need to handle all the traffic; just a big enough fraction to take care of the increase over levels that can be handled by a slightly-improved current road.

At some point if we want to get to a more efficient transportation network, we have to start using more efficient means to handle traffic increases, and that means transit, not just adding more very expensive lanes of traffic indefinitely.

Is it?  I've not heard that before.  A formal EA of options not selected seems incredibly wasteful to me, but I'm no expert.