(05-22-2023, 06:24 PM)bravado Wrote:(05-22-2023, 01:08 PM)Acitta Wrote: Small Cities, Big Transit by Taras Grescoe
Turns Out You Don't Have to Be Chicago-Sized to Have Rail Rapid Transit
But you do need to be anywhere other than North America - and when the bill comes out as too much money, you have to just give up!
It sucks, but I think you need to keep in mind just how much 4'500'000'000 is...and it would no doubt go well over that. You have to put it into context with other projects with this price tag. Now I think a lot of these are in USD but the difference isn't all that great considering inevitable cost overruns. There are a couple dozen countries on this planet that don't have a GDP that high. Line 4 of the TTC and the recent expansion of Line 1 of the TTC cost less - combined. The Thessaloniki Metro in Greece with 35 stations cost half that. Line 6 of the Dhaka Metro in Bangladesh - with 16 elevated heavy rail stations running through one of the densest cities on the planet - cost only 2.8 billion. Indonesia is building an entire high speed rail line across the extremely mountainous island of Java for only 0.5 billion more. The Manila Bay Bridge which crosses over 32 kilometers of the Indian Ocean is cheaper. NASA/SpaceX would be able to launch a few missions to space with the Falcon Heavy reusable spacecraft and not even make a dent in a 4.5 billion dollar budget (it costs less than 100 million per mission when using a reusable rocket).
4.5+ billion is an insane price tag and it just does not make any sense. It makes no sense as to why it costs that much and it makes no sense to spend that much for what we would get. It would become one of the single most expensive megaprojects ever undertaken in Canada. And...it isn't even really a megaproject. It's just a 2 track, partially elevated LRT that would end up being extremely mediocre, just like the first line between Kitchener and Waterloo is.
So how can we even justify spending that much of our money on this? In a city that doesn't really need it? Or who doesn't even want it? I don't think it's really fair to Cambridge yet it's hard to justify spending that amount of money - especially since we'd be getting likely no federal or provincial funding. If planning for the future is what we are trying to do, then we should be spending that money more wisely. Cambridge could be connected with improved BRT or something for less money and it would be sufficient for now. Since they do not have the same level of higher education facilities, the same amount of new development, the same population growth etc it doesn't seem worth the money at the moment. Planning for our future requires fiscal responsibility and I cannot see how we can justify the cost of this for what we'd be getting and what it would be used for.