12-20-2018, 10:43 PM
(12-20-2018, 05:22 PM)SammyOES Wrote: 1) Congestion (and all the things that go with that) are not that bad in Waterloo compared to most of the markets we're competing with for tech companies. There's certainly an argument that local companies will have a harder time pulling talent from Toronto w/o much better transit - but that's a tiny percentage of the available talent pool. It's not just an opinion on how big of an impact it will have. There's lot of hard evidence on why companies are moving here (again - to an area that already had congestion / shitty regional transit - and no short/medium term plan to fix that).
2) I agree this is a setback. I just don't think its a 4-year setback. And I don't think the current government will do the right thing. But hopefully the next one will - and hopefully it will have become an important enough issue (with enough public support) that the way they tackle it will be better than a 10-year plan.
It's certainly true that Waterloo doesn't have significant congestion. But as danbrotherson points out, Waterloo-Toronto congestion is intolerable. Our talent pool is small-to-tiny (I know how many Waterloo SE grads stay in Kitchener-Waterloo, and it's not many) and in any case we need to collaborate with talent in the GTA. There are no good ways to do that now. A problem that can be solved with money and no new technology.