ION Stage I: what would you do differently?

[Bytor]

No. Absolutely not. "Moar busses" is a stunningly ignorant thing to say about solving the overcrowding and delay issues that plagued the 200/7. We already had busses ever 3 minutes and 20 seconds during peak, and every 5 minutes outside of peak. There's only so many busses you can put on a busy route on congested streets and we were at that point.

It's not really an ignorant statement at all. Articulated BRT was considered and studied.

See, now you're moving the goal posts.

Your original statement was:

Perhaps. Could have saved hundred millions dollars and added a few more dozens of buses (or just articulated buses) to the 200/7 routes

That's clearly a "moar busses" comment and not something about a BRT with fancy grade-separated lanes.

An articulated bus can offer something like 80-85% of the capacity that Flexity Freedom LRVs do and they were the next strongest contender. We also did studies on monorails and subway systems. The LRT was obviously the preferred option because we got a lot of funding for it from the provincial and federal governments, and at a regional level, they considered that it would offer more economic benefits over BRT. We could have easily built a BRT network with both grade separation and signal priority without sacrificing much in terms of capacity and would gone with exactly that if we didn't get money from higher levels of government. As I said in another comment somewhere, the LRT was alluring as an economic engine, but our actual network isn't all that rapid.

BRT was dropped not because we got funding from senior levels of government for an LRT only. By 2008, if not earlier, it was clear that LRT was the preferable option and the only question was how big would Stage 1 LRT be. You can see that in the public consultation docs which are still available online. BRT was deemed not suitable for the most heavily used portion of the system at least 2 years before we got funding.

Also, even when federal and provincial funding commitments were announced in 2010, they were still both for BRT or LRT, not just for an LRT system.

You are misremembering things if you think LRT was chosen because that's what we got funding for.