GO Transit

[danbrotherston]

The problem with "slow but incremental progress" is that it doesn't occur in a vacuum. If we very gradually add train service, but rapidly expand roads and develop more sprawl we are actually losing ground, not gaining it.

I'm not sure how quickly major road expansion actually occurs.  For instance, the Highway 8/401 interchange expansion plus the widening of the 401 east of Waterloo Region felt like it took the best part of 15 years without including the planning work that happened before the first shovel hit the ground.  Highway 7 between Kitchener and Guelph has been on the books for the best part of 40 years but it hasn't exactly roared out of the gate.

For better or for worse, gone are the days when a railway (or anything else that large) can be built halfway across the country in a decade. (Excluding the the existing railways that it absorbed, the CPR was built from 1875 to 1885 between southern Ontario and BC).

Yes, Ontario is doing major highway expansions and new construction, much faster than we are with trains.

But I wasn't even talking about that, just look at the road construction Waterloo Region is doing. It's great we built the LRT, but in the time we built the LRT we are building MULTIPLE new stroad/highways and expanding others...before the next phase of the LRT is built, we'll have build more roads.

Tom Galloway said to me one time, that staff claimed that building the LRT would eliminate the need to build 500 lane-km of roadway in the city, but he hasn't seen any reduction in the capital expansion plan.

And we're probably one of the most progressive cities when it comes to sprawl that isn't geographically constrained, I don't even want to know how many miles of roadway Brampton is building in the time it will take them to build the LRT (half of which was cancelled).

Someone had an amazing stat about how much farm land we lose everyday. Every inch of that land is sprawl. We do not build sustainable places anymore. Every inch of that land is us literally losing ground.

This is why I'm so cynical on fixing cities. Even if we make progress, we're losing the war.

[nms]

So was part of the LRT sales pitch a bait-and-switch and road construction wasn't going to slow down at all? Or did Waterloo Region's growth accelerate? Or was the staff figure actually "we'll not need 500 km/lanes of traffic [once we build out the next 1000 km/lanes on the books]"?

North American transportation practice is like an ocean freighter, it's not going to pivot overnight. But it's slowly turning and shifting.

[danbrotherston]

So was part of the LRT sales pitch a bait-and-switch and road construction wasn't going to slow down at all? Or did Waterloo Region's growth accelerate? Or was the staff figure actually "we'll not need 500 km/lanes of traffic [once we build out the next 1000 km/lanes on the books]"?

North American transportation practice is like an ocean freighter, it's not going to pivot overnight. But it's slowly turning and shifting.

I mean, the 500 lane-km wasn't a specific "we'll not build these three roads" or something specific like that...

It has to do with building traffic models and estimating mode shift and that kind of thing.

Frankly, it's all bullshit...Donald Shoup could have written a book eviscerating traffic forecasting instead of parking minimums. They're equally comprised of snake oil.

So, in a way, take it with a grain of salt...but on the other hand, what traffic forecasting *IS* is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We decided we wanted something different from more cars (i.e., transit), and so we built transit. And it's successful, we are growing transit ridership.

However, we're also addicted to cars...despite wanting to build something different, the regional staff are unwilling to plan for something different, so when they "model" the traffic to justify road investment, they use the same growth in cars that they've always used.

So if you want to go through the transportation plans and try to dissect it and compare with the population growth. But there's about a billion different variables so...there isn't going to be a clear answer. What I do know is that the region continues to plan for increased VMT and also VMT/capita.

And yeah, a big ship is slow to turn...but they continue to practice voodoo where they "forecast" transportation, build what they forecast they need, then earn awards and such when people magically use the infrastructure that engineers divined they would need. And the continue to plan for failure in terms of changing our transportation mode split...i.e., they expect us to drive more.

The ship won't turn till these things change.

(FWIW I'm being slightly unfair with the "still" part here...AFAIK they haven't done a new transportation master plan...so until that happens they won't have another chance to change their broken policies).

[dunkalunk]

The line is running elevated pretty much from the Grand River Crossing to King St where it transitions to median with an overpass over the ramp. Lots of money to be saved here if the MTO can play nice and run trains in their right of way, or if it Sayed side-running on the south side of King

[Bytor]

So was part of the LRT sales pitch a bait-and-switch and road construction wasn't going to slow down at all? Or did Waterloo Region's growth accelerate? Or was the staff figure actually "we'll not need 500 km/lanes of traffic [once we build out the next 1000 km/lanes on the books]"?

Where did you think that road construction would slow down because of ION LRT? ION was only said to *mitigate* the growth of congestion, never to halt it

We can have a growing modal share for transit and still have the raw numbers of cars on the road increasing.

[danbrotherston]

So was part of the LRT sales pitch a bait-and-switch and road construction wasn't going to slow down at all? Or did Waterloo Region's growth accelerate? Or was the staff figure actually "we'll not need 500 km/lanes of traffic [once we build out the next 1000 km/lanes on the books]"?

Where did you think that road construction would slow down because of ION LRT? ION was only said to *mitigate* the growth of congestion, never to halt it

We can have a growing modal share for transit and still have the raw numbers of cars on the road increasing.

I believe I originally introduced the claim, but it was explicitly stated by the Region's staff. Their projections showed us building 500 fewer lane kms over the transportation plans timeframe.

As for what ION does to congestion, that's arguable, but it of course has nothing to do with a transportation planner's transportation projections, which are, as I said earlier...a work of fiction, divination, reading of tea leaves, however you want to put it.

[KevinL]

Someone noticed the barrier texture near the Park Street crossing and posted to Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments...t_is_this/

[danbrotherston]

Someone noticed the barrier texture near the Park Street crossing and posted to Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments...t_is_this/

The comments are very interesting. They reveal a lot about peoples misperceptions about human nature and people. It kinda explains peoples responses to other policies.

[KevinL]

I didn't realize this until now, but the London GO run can be considered the 'longest commuter rail line in North America'.

Given that record, a Boston-based transit YouTuber took a ride on it.

[Acitta]

I didn't realize this until now, but the London GO run can be considered the 'longest commuter rail line in North America'.

Given that record, a Boston-based transit YouTuber took a ride on it.

Well, I guess it is till October 13th.

[ac3r]

It makes absolutely no sense to run a GO train all the way to London anyway. Even for commuters going between London and Waterloo Region it is still over a 2 hour long trip which nobody in their right mind would do on a regular basis. And to get to Toronto it's like what...4.5 hours? That's just one way. Very few people are willing to waste that much time.

I don't really get why they even tried to pilot this. Seems like a waste of money that could have been better spent improving other aspects of GO Transit.

[panamaniac]

It makes absolutely no sense to run a GO train all the way to London anyway. Even for commuters going between London and Waterloo Region it is still over a 2 hour long trip which nobody in their right mind would do on a regular basis. And to get to Toronto it's like what...4.5 hours? That's just one way. Very few people are willing to waste that much time.

I don't really get why they even tried to pilot this. Seems like a waste of money that could have been better spent improving other aspects of GO Transit.

Because VIA wants to stop using the line?

[tomh009]

It makes absolutely no sense to run a GO train all the way to London anyway. Even for commuters going between London and Waterloo Region it is still over a 2 hour long trip which nobody in their right mind would do on a regular basis. And to get to Toronto it's like what...4.5 hours? That's just one way. Very few people are willing to waste that much time.

I don't really get why they even tried to pilot this. Seems like a waste of money that could have been better spent improving other aspects of GO Transit.

1h36 from Kitchener to Union Station on what I would call a "semi-express" train. Don't know what the trip length is from London, but it'll be long for any kind of a daily commute.

[danbrotherston]

It makes absolutely no sense to run a GO train all the way to London anyway. Even for commuters going between London and Waterloo Region it is still over a 2 hour long trip which nobody in their right mind would do on a regular basis. And to get to Toronto it's like what...4.5 hours? That's just one way. Very few people are willing to waste that much time.

I don't really get why they even tried to pilot this. Seems like a waste of money that could have been better spent improving other aspects of GO Transit.

1h36 from Kitchener to Union Station on what I would call a "semi-express" train. Don't know what the trip length is from London, but it'll be long for any kind of a daily commute.

The commute from London to Kitchener was...not great, but certainly the type of commute that GO transit would support, however, the timing was bad...it arrived in KW way too early for commuters.

And if they wanted to serve London->Toronto, the Via mainline is much faster, and it would be an extension of the trains to Aldershot.

As for what they're thinking...at best, blindly idioticallly Toronto centric, at worst, intentionally bad with the goal of killing the idea, and frankly, I have trouble giving the benefit of the doubt here...despite Hanlon's Razor, a GO BUS would have been faster since the London->KW tracks are well...lets just say...a century out of date. So it takes a ridiculous level of apathy and ignorance to decide to implement that train instead of literally any other option. Hence, I strongly believe it was intentionally bad.

That being said, it was at least useful to me once...sadly, when we visit at Christmas I'm going to have to find another way from KW to London.

[ac3r]

That being said, it was at least useful to me once...sadly, when we visit at Christmas I'm going to have to find another way from KW to London.

VIA would still be the most direct option at just under 2 hours. Alternatively PC Connect still operates, but it's almost a 4 hour trip which is ridiculous and you don't get a whole lot of time between transfers, but it's still doable.