Station Park | 18, 28, 36, 40, 50 fl | U/C

[the_conestoga_guy]

B.c. we aren't on council ;/

Haha. It's true.

But to answer plam: because this is Waterloo Region. We don't have the money to sink into mass rapid transit projects...nor do we seem to have the political will. And whether the majority of citizens would want to see greater investment in mass transit is unknown. It's hard to sell that stuff when the majority of your population doesn't use it to begin with.

We built the LRT (with huge contributions from the federal and provincial governments) but it's a bit of a joke compared to actual rapid transit in North America. It gets you from A to B but it's not exactly fast or high capacity. It's already 2023 and the Cambridge line is still dead in the water. I doubt that'll even be started by 2033 nevermind actually operating.

We're projected to be just short of 1'000'000 people by 2040 which is a lot of people...but there is very little chance we continue to invest in mass, megaproject transit to manage that number of people. Chances are we'll find ourselves in the same situation we did prior to the LRT: what exists will become grossly overloaded (prior to the LRT, the mainlines such as the 7 & 8 as well as the iXpress routes were always packed). They then realized they needed something more because they couldn't just keep adding buses, so they invested in the LRT. The LRT has been fine for now, but by the time we are nearing a million people we're going to need much more, such as additional lines built. But I can't imagine how much of a struggle that will be when the time comes, considering how hard it was to sell the LRT to the public at the time.

The region will study and plan more LRT lines for sure and add new bike lanes, multi use trails and other auxiliary forms of transportation. But I don't see us ever becoming a transit first city/region. The car is always going to dominate, at least in our lifetimes. If only it was as easy as playing SimCity or Cities: Skylines where you can just slap down some nice trails, subway lines and LRTs and call it a day.

But anyway, wrong thread for this stuff.

Honestly, the Region could get, like, 90% of the way there by investing in buses and bus-priority traffic signal upgrades. It wouldn't be as flashy as a new subway, but having reliable 5-10 minute headways on every bus route in the city would do more to shift the mode-share than a single rapid transit project and it could be had for a fraction of the cost. Plus, once there's a significant mode share, it's a lot easier to advocate for bus-only lanes and the like.