06-21-2021, 05:18 PM
(06-21-2021, 04:56 PM)ac3r Wrote:(06-21-2021, 04:27 PM)panamaniac Wrote: Stage 2 isn’t really about ridership, is it?
I've been pretty involved with the research into the LRT line going into Cambridge. So far, I've found Cambridge to have much fewer objections (at least so far) to the LRT than Kitchener and Waterloo had. They've seen how much the LRT has benefitted the other two cities at this point. We were basically the guinea pigs. Most Cambridge residents acknowledge that they are a struggling city and that having this would be like pouring nitrous into their fuel tanks. Most people do want it, they're just worried about things like property appropriation (which is pretty minimal, at least in the studies done so far), environmental disturbances, traffic issues, school overcrowding etc but all of that can be improved as needed.
Thanks for this — very interesting information! My impression has always been that the anti-LRT people in Cambridge can’t figure out if they are pro-LRT (but want it in Cambridge immediately, not at some unknown time in the future) or actually anti-LRT. It sounds like now that there isn’t the distraction of thinking about the timing of LRT construction in the different cities, the overall mood might be more conducive.
I was going to suggest that Stage 2 is not about ridership in the short term, but in the long term it is. In the short term buses will be capable of taking the load for quite some time. But longer term, by providing higher quality transit in a much larger area, we should be able to develop much more of the city to be transit-friendly, which will lead to much higher ridership. Whenever a new area is opened up for subdivisions it goes without saying that major roads will be constructed on the assumption that there will be traffic. It is high time that we start building transit in the same way.