GO Transit

[ijmorlan]

This is all quite a big distraction.

It’s not an unreasonable request that our levels of government talk to each other and plan together. Especially when projects like this don’t exactly happen quickly and surprise people. It’s not up to citizens to make sure that public services work properly.

How do we break these information silos within the dozen levels of government in this country?

This is like if a regional road and a municipal road had a 1 metre gap between them after construction and it was somehow up to citizens to let the engineers know about it.

I think that’s actually a really good analogy. We just assume and expect that road expansions and construction will happen, don’t tend to worry too much about the cost, and can count on them being properly engineered to connect to other roads (at least, well engineered for drivers; not necessarily for other road users). But transit and active transportation projects are debated endlessly and get criticized for cost all the time, and we can’t count on them being designed well.

(note: this doesn’t mean I think the cost of the Cambridge LRT extension is reasonable)