Grand River Transit

[dtkvictim]

And therein lies the problem—defeatist acceptance of the neoliberal mantras of "lower taxes" and "trickle down" and saying that the only thing one can look at is the current budget and not talk about how it should have been different.

You're arguing with your own imagination. I never said that the budget is right, or anything about the current budget. It doesn't matter if we quadrupled it overnight, what it said remains true.

Your analogy is made unworkable because of that lack of direct comparability.

What's the latent demand for transit service during summer daytime? Given that people still have jobs during the summer and often make more trips to festivals around town, visiting friends, and such, one can infer quite high. Not dropping the LRT to 15-minute daytime headways and the still visibly high usage per tram has shown this to be so.

What's the latent demand for all-night service? No where near as much. The number of people on a given bus or tram stays high until 9:30pm or so but then noticibly drops off after that. How much do you want to bet that this after even with the extended 15-minute headways on the busiest bus routes that

Yes, the value of latent demand fulfilled per extra dollar spent on service during the summer is almost certainly better than overnight. But you're making a value judgement on how to spend the budget by distributing service unevenly over some time frame, just as GRT has. Surely you acknowledge that without the budget increasing, increasing overnight service would come at the cost of daytime service and they would have to meet somewhere in the middle? Why do you deny that same tradeoff in regards to summer service?

I'm not arguing against increasing the budget, improving service, or doing away with the summer schedule. I'm just confused why there are people here arguing against the reality that you only get to pick one way to spend a budget and every choice comes with tradeoffs.