Raise the Hammer

It is truly horrendous that our city will easily commute to hundreds of millions of dollars of suburban highway infrastructure to facilitate the automobile commute to Toronto (which, as mentioned above, kinda destroys the bus option at rush hour), but will not commit even a fraction of that to getting regular train service, which uses a fraction of the land, energy and money.

It's definitely worth mentioning, though, that such a change would require light rail as well, or else all of the downtown affordable housing would be gentrified out of existance within weeks - imagine the millions of professionals commuting into Bay St and the like realising that they could forego their overpriced suburban homes and get to their job in Toronto in an hour or less, right from the same downtown hamilton where a large 2-bedroom can be found for $600/month and houses can be found for just over $100 grand. Without an efficient way to get them TO the Go station (or LIUNA Station), thousands of low-income (without the option of cars with which to live in un-walkable neighbourhoods) people will lose their places to live.

Transit is without a doubt the most important component in "rejuvenating" our core. Nearly every bus line in the city passes through it, as well as intercity bus and train lines. In many cities, such hubs generate booming business. In Hamilton, the square kilometer surrounding all of this is largely derelict. Lower fares, more efficient service (whether it's LRT or BRT, anything beats waiting 20 minutes on Main St. for 4 different busses on nearly identical routes to come at once), more trains, better integration and denser developments are needed to accomplish this, but none of that compares in cost or difficulty to the constant expansion of our suburbs and highways to handle automobile traffic.