ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[danbrotherston]

It was going to get built anyway

This is the key point. As someone that was deeply involved in the project's approval, all I can tell you is I disagree with you completely and totally. ION came within a hair of getting cancelled entirely on multiple occasions, many of them not public.

We can't prove hypotheticals, but what I can say is look at London, or Hamilton, or Victoria. All of them were talking about LRTs at the same time we were, and how many of them have an LRT today? Zero. I just don't see how you can claim such certainty that ION would get built, when we have so many examples of other similar cities in similar situations cancelling their LRT projects.

These sorts of projects are far from certain, as other cities show, and I genuinely have zero doubt that doubling the cost to do some tunneling would have killed the project.

I'm not here to tell you ION is perfect, despite your constant strawman-ing of all ION supporters as fanboys. I hate how slow it is, I hate we have the route splits, the list goes on. But you know what I'm certain of? We're the only mid size Canadian city to have an LRT, despite plenty of other cities wanting them.

The most successful LRTs are those that get built. Look at Calgary vs Edmonton, both built their initial LRTs at about the same time. Edmonton tunneled, Calgary cheaped out so hard the trains didn't even have air conditioning. One now has far more ridership than the other, and a far larger system. It's not the city that splurged on the better system. The higher costs killed Edmonton LRT expansion.

This is extremely on point, and RM Transit had a good segment on this as well. Basically the message is, we need to build cheap transit, because we need to build more transit, and when transit is excessively expensive, we won't get very much of it for our dollars.

And I think this is worth keeping in mind when discussing Phase 2...and how that might affect the possibility of Phase 3.