ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[dtkvictim]

That is infeasible. You talk about grade separation as if it’s a minor tweak to the design, like having heated platforms. It’s not.

And in any case, it makes no sense to spend a huge amount of money grade separating the system to save one life per year (or whatever; probably not even that many) when you could save many more lives by building more LRT lines similar to the one we have and getting more traffic out of cars.

More fundamentally, you cannot make the world safe. There are situations in which one can feasibly eliminate classes of hazard. For example, machinery that takes both hands to activate, ensuring that one does not accidentally amputate ones other hand. There are other situations where similar preventive measures are either infeasible or outright impossible.

Here is your mental gymnastics award: http://www.americare-health.com/wp-conte.../award.jpg

There is nothing "infeasible" about designing a rapid transit system to be as safe as it possibly can be to prevent accidents and death as often as possible. Not sure why you would attempt to argue otherwise. As it stands, the LRT essentially has no real safety features to prevent collisions (whether it is with a vehicle or individual) other than putting the burden of not getting maimed or killed on the victim rather than a technology whose safety essentially boils down to a loud horn and "please stay off tracks" signage due to the region and tax payers being too damn cheap. Look what that has got us...a guarantee for a lifetime of endless collisions and deaths because there's no tweaking it. It's built already and it was built poorly.

While I realize even if you elevated the entire thing or built it as a light metro you could and still likely would inevitably have an incident, that's just the nature of things, you cannot make the argument that it's just not worth the money to save lives or to treat it like a simple numbers game like "well who cares if one kid possibly dies, saving their life is just not worth the money for good design and it was their fault for crossing; we should also build more LRT lines so less cars hit people too." What kind of reasoning is that?

So you deny and mock his argument, and then immediately acknowledge he is right?

Building elevated or underground rail was infeasible, it was impossible. It's called politics. The only choices were build LRT, or stick with the status quo. The same status quo that I mentioned above which saw many students hit by cars over my 4 years at the school, vs the 1 student hit in nearly 4 years of LRT operation.

The safety futures of our LRT are hardly exceptional on a global scale. Are you suggesting that the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of tram lines of Europe ought to be torn out and buried underground?

I'm not suggesting improvements can't be made, but you seem to be going on an illogical personal vendetta against our system for some reason.