General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[ac3r]

Yeah, speed the fuckin thing up around places like Hayward Avenue etc. I recently took a trip on the LRT with a train engineer who works for BNSF - and this girl drives intermodal freight trains with hundreds of cars along some of the toughest routes in North America...so she knows a lot about trains. She was completely perplexed as to why it went so slow there (along with many other turns as we took the entire route). Without even having knowledge of the physics and mathematics and all that, she was able to tell me that there is absolutely no reason for the LRT to grind to such slow halts and spray sand every 5 seconds. I was legitimately embarrassed as we slowed down to a walking pace 100 meters or more before we even got to the turns. She kept joking about getting out and jogging to the next station. I had no answer to her curiosity - not even that they wanted to save money. It just makes no sense that they take these turns at such extremely slow speeds. She was like, yeah this is why most light rail/street car systems failed in major American cities: they interact with traffic and travel very slow, so nobody wants to waste their time using them unless they have no choice or need to save 5-10 minutes.