ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[KingandWeber]

The Toronto subway claims many lives a year as well and its grade separated. We don't know the circumstances for this specific case but walking in a fenced area of the system in the middle of the night could have been due to many different reasons.
With the TO case, platform screen doors could help but really there's a point of declining returns for the investment made. Where there's a will to trespass there will always be a way.

There's quite a difference though. TTC subway fatalities are quite often suicides, accidental falls and the occasional psychotic person pushing someone onto the tracks (though that is extremely rare). And when it comes to subways, they're grade separated indeed but the stations are totally open. Thankfully, as you said, screen doors can be helpful. Unfortunately cost is once again the issue. It is estimated to cost well over 1 billion dollars to install screen doors on TTC subway stations, although that figure seems extremely bloated for such a simple technology.

The issue is: what price do we put on a human life? This forum will whine for weeks when a cyclist is killed and cry to the wolves that we should be lowering speed limits, putting crossing islands in, adding in new lights or speed bumps and so on and so on. All of that costs money, either in the construction of the infrastructure or the economic losses incurred by making it harder for people to get places in a timely manner. We want safe cycling lanes and sidewalks, so why not safe transit? I don't have any children but if I did, I would gladly put any sum value on their life...whether that was to improve bike lanes or rapid transit.

Unfortunately it is already too late to really do anything about this since we were too cheap to build the LRT in a safe manner in the first place. They got this thing approved as fast as they could and cut sooooooooo many corners to save money on it. Safety was not a priority. Any safety boils down to a horn, some signs and lights and essentially saying to anyone "it's your duty to not get your car hit or your life taken". Which, yes, it is our personal responsibility to ensure that but we also have to ensure we also mitigate as many avenues for those incidents from occurring in the first place.

Accidents will always happen, but we should be trying everything we can to design and engineer a world in which they are harder to happen. It's a very simple concept, money be damned. If money is an issue then to hell with bike lanes and pedestrian islands, right?

You're missing a very important qualifier, which is "reasonably". In almost every case, it is unreasonable to take every safety precaution in engineering our world. And yes, that means we sometimes must make choices that will, at least on the face of things, statistically result in more direct injuries or even deaths to obtain certain other benefits. However, in the case of ION, I actually highly doubt (although it's impossible to know for certain) that there have been an increased number of accidents or deaths owing to its construction. Indeed, for the two people who have died and the others injured in car accidents involving ION, we don't know how many passengers did not die because they were never hit by a bus that ION replaced or never in a car accident and instead safely rode the ION. Further, the two deaths involving ION so far sound like they were the result of extreme recklessness or perhaps a willful intent to be harmed (as they involved individuals walking on active, dedicated train tracks at night) so I hardly think they're much different than the TTC fatalities you think are acceptable. And this is all without getting into the social, environmental and economic benefits of ION, which I think are numerous.

Boiling it all down though, I'm actually very interested to hear if your position is that the ION should simply not have been built at all. Taking into account the political climate and financial resources of the time, we know for an almost certainty that there would be no LRT today if it had to be grade separated so that was ultimately the choice that had to be made. I think the Region made the right choice in the circumstances, but I guess there is some argument we could have had a substantially larger BRT network with the money we spent. And this is not to say I think ION is perfect - far from it (I personally think it should have run through King St in Kitchener and that station planning could have been much improved, in both cases without any added cost) - but overall I think the project exemplifies not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.