Delays Would Make LRT Fiasco Worse: THE VOTER

09/25/2023

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It’s becoming scary, this blind allegiance to the existing LRT plan. Or any LRT plan.

Do these people not know that if Stage 2 and/or 3 are delayed for any significant period of time, that it will be back to the drawing board for most of it?

All the environmental assessments will have to be redone; the population and ridership studies will be useless; the funding structure will have been scrapped; the rest of the transportation system, including buses and other vehicles and their roadways, will have changed immensely to compensate for the lack of train service; and dozens of other factors that led to the current blueprints will have changed beyond recognition. Importantly, some of those changes will be irrevocable.

The thing that is most likely to affect future LRT development will be the change of politicians and politics over the decades it will probably take for this to be revisited.

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The foibles of LRT now form case studies in university classes all over the world and they aren’t presented as positive examples of how to do things. They are taught as demonstrations of how badly things can go off the rails with what looked like well-thought-out and reasonable plans. To be a politician in the future who wants to try to re-introduce LRT expansion will be so fraught with challenges and barriers that only either the very brave or the very stupid would attempt it. Trying to coerce other levels of government to throw good money after bad to support the LRT will be a virtually impossible task. That is, of course, after you’ve persuaded the residents of Ottawa that they should get on board again with such a project, bringing their cheque books with them.

I’m fairly certain that my grandchildren won’t ride on any part of Phase 3 and begin to doubt if their grandchildren ever will.

The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.