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ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit
(03-22-2019, 10:31 AM)Spokes Wrote: But if it was in the near future, should they not have a date they're confident in?  That's what I mean.

There's function that describe the area of confidence for any particular date, and I don't know what it is but right now I suspect the cost in political capital of being wrong about a date is weighted very highly. So they may be 95% confident that things will release on Victoria Day weekend (that's my hope, but based on dreams and wishes, not data) but if there are enough unknowns around what might continue to block burn-in testing they'll just continue to stay quiet. It sucks for everyone, but it sucks less for them if something slips.
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(03-22-2019, 10:31 AM)Spokes Wrote: But if it was in the near future, should they not have a date they're confident in?  That's what I mean.

The question is, what is "near" future. If the target date were in the next 30 days, I would expect them to have sufficient confidence, yes. But the further out you go, into the 60-90 day range, the greater the variables and the lower the confidence.

Since we don't know what that target date is, it's hard to project the underlying reasons.
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Someone in the FB group pointed out the other significant quote from the article I missed when I was posting it right before bed.

Quote:The trains are now being run on a schedule to mimic real service, with trains stopping at each station, opening and shutting doors as if riders were getting on and off, he said.
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The Record is pumping out LRT articles left right and centre now Ezra is old news again. I'm sure quite a few regulars will get a kick out of this article and the videos in it.

Ion drivers eager for launch of LRT service in Waterloo Region
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I saw a pair of trains downtown about an hour ago, coming west on Frederick/Benton the first made the turn onto Duke and thankfully no one turned into its path and then I saw one heading down Charles street... pretty sweet seeing them out there.
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Apparently today's activity is shuttling trains between the crossovers at Cameron and Green - so lots of downtown sightings to be had.
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I like that they're making testing more "realistic" in terms of following the route with stops, etc
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506 has been sitting at King & Victoria all morning. Did somebody break it?
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Was downtown and saw that 502 had a bunch of people from Crosslinx on board today. Must be on a tour or something.
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Seeing the units in use, makes sense.
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This also gives away the Ion's internal route number: 301.
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(03-26-2019, 04:32 PM)KevinL Wrote: This also gives away the Ion's internal route number: 301.

The ION Bus from Fairway Station to Ainslie is 302.  Tongue
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(03-26-2019, 04:06 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: They are starting to roll out ION replacement shuttle stops:

I was musing to myself that maybe they should have gone ahead with the bus route re-organization, just using the ION replacement shuttle route until the LRT is operational. Maybe last fall, in September 2018. Although I suppose the shuttle must take buses away from other routes so they couldn’t fully switch to the new route layout anyway.
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Part of what irritated me about the various detours of the 200 is that GRT did not seem to see the obvious (to me) logic of trying to replicate Ion's eventual route, to build ridership. Some people will recall that, at one point, the 200 had no stops between Uptown and Downtown, even though Ion will have three.

I think that doing the bus re-organization early would have been a great thing. Maybe even scrapping the 200 early (to reallocate those buses, as will be done when Ion starts running), and running the shuttle, as you say.

The argument against would be the reason that was given to explain the 200's current detour: the 7 can apparently not share King Street with a rapid bus service.
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