A place to discuss all the news and events taking place in the province of Ontario, Canada.
Rules
"“There is no point in building infrastructure we may or may not need for 30 years’ time,” Metrolinx deputy chief capital officer Richard Walker said in a November 2024 town hall."
More like, we should have had this infrastructure 30 years ago, so then the 401 might have not been so fucking busy.
That’s such a dumb statement from an exec member at Metrolinx. Let’s take an example here. The Kitchener line connects some of the most populous cities in Ontario after the Lakeshore line, and is, optically on a map, the closest point to expand all the way to London, another populous city. Many people have to frequently go into Toronto for work, family, education, etc. Do they think that number’s gonna go down in 30 years’ time? What the heck gonna happen to make that number go down?
And the GTA is not even bigger than the Greater Tokyo Area by both its urban and metro land mass. Sure, it’s 3x denser in Tokyo, but it’s dense not cause people have nowhere else to live, but cause the infrastructure IS there to facilitate it. Induced demand works for railways as much as they do for highways.
RM Transit made a somewhat emotional video after reading this article, if anyone has followed that channel. IDK if it’s on YouTube, but it’s on Nebula.
This is definitely a sad one to read. I can’t say I’m incredibly privy to the matters there, so I’m saying these based on the article and Reese’s (from RM Transit) comments. Metrolinx brought in foreign transit companies, with decades of experience under their belt, to advise and help build our transit system, but execs and seniors are somehow just stuck with their own idea of what transit looks like and wouldn’t budge on it. It’s such a disgraceful episode of working with people from other countries. Regardless if the people at Deutsche Bahn were actually insensitive to local sensitivities and have their own working style, you’ve signed that contract, so at least show that you’re willing to take in that advice and argue constructively. And heck, where is the public input on this?
It's good to see that The Trillium has free articles as they're independent media and Ground News categorizes them as left.