ION Stage I: what would you do differently?

[tomh009]

Which is it, did we waste money or not spend enough?

I think we spent too much for what we got. We could have spent less and got close to the same, or more and got a system that would have been truly independent, not relying on the very roads we all claim to despise here, that goes just as slow as cars at times and has to stop at red lights to let them pass.

You make some good points in your post. And cut-and-cover is indeed cheaper -- but the costs of underground or elevated stations would have also been far higher than the fairly basic ones we have now. And accessibility would have been worse.

However, my main issue is the bolded portion above: the design of the system does not dictate the speeds we have today, nor does it require stopping at red lights. The system can be speeded up by relaxing speed limits and providing traffic light priority. And an elevated/buried system would still need the same amount of time for dwell times, deceleration and acceleration, though it might have been able to smooth out some turns to make them faster.

Summa summarum: As our population grows and the transit usage grows, our current LRT can certainly be made to run significantly faster -- and that's without any substantial additional capital investment.