Comment 51835

By seancb (registered) - website | Posted November 18, 2010 at 10:15:17

I'd guess that Hamilton will have to chose between basic repairs (sewers, roads etc.) and improvements. I hope it choses the former - for now.

This is a huge reason that I wish we would scrap the AEGD and the Stadium, as well as take a good logical look at the transit plan.

The AEGD and Stadium are huge up front expenditures with zero chance of financial (let alone societal) payback. We might as well dump our tax money into the bay. LRT could follow the same fate if we are not smart about our plan. Pie in the sky initial spending could bury us. I am speaking specifically about nutty ideas like burrowing a tunnel throgh the mountain to run tracks, and running lines out to the fringes where ridership demand is nowhere near high enough.

Better to focus the transit plan on where we know we need it, and intelligently future proof where we know we'll need better transit in the future. Then when the initial smaller system succeeds we will have clear justification for expanding.

Along the same lines, a huge mistake would be to build the entire system as BRT from the get-go, only to realize in 5 years that we actually need higher order rail transit on key lines, and have to build that from scratch (or continue to suffer from underserviced lines).

So let's figure out where we can justify rail now, where we will need it in the future, and where we may never need it, and plan accordingly.

I vote down for offensiveness and up for humour. I cast no votes based on my level of agreement.

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