ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

For what it's worth, this is apparently from staff involved in setting up the walkway:

This was a requirement of the purchase of property.  From a liability perspective, Canadian Tire (ed. likely referring to Part Source) wanted to minimize pedestrian traffic through their parking lot and loading area.  Without the fencing requirement, we wouldn’t have been in a position to acquire the land and would likely have needed to conduct an expropriation process.  Had the expropriation process been necessary, there’s very little chance that the walkway would be established at this time.

Hey! Enough with your facts! Begone!

But seriously, thanks for digging this up.

I must point out that this in no way invalidates Dan’s points about the pedestrian-hostility, nor does it make it acceptable planning. It just explains the details of why specifically those fences were built.

If the LRT planning process had been conducted in a competent fashion, the need for crossings (multiple) in that stretch would have been identified during the environmental assessment process, and appropriate crossings included in the final design for construction.

In this case I have no hesitation in calling out the planning process as incompetent because the existence of “desire lines” was evident in aerial photography available to everybody, from politicians to designers to every armchair critic in the world, by just taking a look at Google Maps. If the people responsible for planning major infrastructure can’t be bothered to take a quick look at the aerial photography before proceeding with detailed design, then they are negligent in their duty to the public.