ION Phase 2 - Cambridge's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

That's a bad faith argument. People travelling between Cambridge and Kitchener by transit have never had any choice but to go through Sportsworld (unless prepared to stop and transfer at Conestoga, and nobody likes a transfer), so of course that's where the ridership numbers will put them.

If that were the case, then why didn't the new 206 have more riders when it started in the fall than the 302 had, if it's the better route? It's not a bad faith argument, it's reality.

Huh?

The 206 runs down highway 8 to sportsworld...not sure what that has to do with Homer Watson.

I'm all for ION and think it was a huge opportunity lost by taking highway 8 through the Sportsworld desert rather than down Homer Watson where people actually live, work, and go to school.

Except the transit ridership was not there. As I have already pointed out elsewhere, there's no big commercial nodes on Manitou or Homer  equivalent to Sportsworld. Huron Business Park doesn't front onto Homer and light industrial areas like that are rarely good ridership generators since their jobs per hectare densities are low. The residential areas along Homer Watson in Doon and Pioneer Park are also low density inside the LRT 800m catchment area of an LRT. People may live, work and go to school down there, but not very many of them. It's why the 76 has stayed only a busPlus route for so long.

You'd have  a better case if even just the ridership to Conestoga College was higher, but it never has been. As I pointed out elsewhere, it even started to fall before the pandemic even with the expanded service of the 10/100 to the college. The 10 and the 110 are the only route I've noticed so far where the boardings declined from Fall 2018 to Fall 2019, the period of the biggest year over year jumps in GRT ridership ever. Compare that to the 57, a route which doesn't have Sunday service and goes through the rural areas on the west side of the Grand River, experienced a 3x jump in the fall of 2019!

You talk about people going "through" instead of to or from. Well, putting the 200 and it's successor the 302 through there instead of Sportsworld would probably resulted in a lot of people only going "through" the Homer Watson corridor rather than stopping there, given that the data seems to show us there would not be good uptake.

This isn't bad faith, it's simply the numbers. The Sportsworld route was and still is the better route because of distance (shortening trip time), nodes along the way, existing transit usage, and potential uptake.

You are basing this entirely on the commercial properties at Sportsworld. That is the ONLY destination that Sportsworld has that Homer-Watson doesn't.

You're discounting entirely having a post secondary educational facility (which traditionally drive a huge portion of ridership, if the service is good), and you're waffling on housing, which is absolutely stronger on Homer Watson, it is MOSTLY low density, but includes several high density areas, unlike Pioneer which is exclusively low density and much smaller.

That really sounds like cherrypicking.