Substantiate how what in reality would be skeletal rapid transit for a city that will be closer to 2M population than 1M on opening day should not be a fast train with scalable capacity and frequency. If it should be, high-floor is superior in every regard plus it forces them to not be able to be lazy and make it a streetcar. Now realigning this to a totally different corridor and/or completely changing the scope is a different story. Permanent and scalable transit seems to really not be what either provinical government or the city government wants. The Green Line should follow the original ROW, should be a high-floor train (thus should be allowed to cross streets but realistically not run on them), and should be built with the intention of serving a city with double the density (near the corridor) and population.
Listen folks, the point is this is a foundational project for the city that is going to be built to possibly serve after we're all dead and gone (look at how old the New York subway is). Forcing people to either go up a ramp to a real train station, or use an escalator, does not ruin a streetscape, whatever that word even mean, more than making them play in traffic to get to a sidewalk in the middle of the road to get on a train that's slower than a Ford Model T. Just imagine that Centre St has the 40km/h "train" in the middle with its "stations" that are built like the average concrete median on a road with the only shelter being plopped down bus shelters that inevitably have been smashed into a million and one pieces, while in the only driving lane, Skip the dishes is stopped in the middle of the road (because they think they own it) to pick up Tim Horton's chili that hasn't even been put in the microwave yet while chaos is ensuing outside. Or imagine the same bus stop "train station" when the plow goes by in the winter and it gets covered in crud. And when people in this future complain when the system is hitting capacity, the government will tell us can't be scaled up anymore because the design inherently hinders any more meaningful expansion. Then people will wonder why billions were spent on something that was a permanent temporary solution. Then we'll be thinking damn we should've taken our time and done it right.
Cities really only get one shot at these sorts of projets and then they have to deal with it and move on to something else. What is happening right now is both the city and provincial governments want to say that they got it built (to their vision), whatever it actually is, for some price that they deemed acceptable, regardless of whether it was worth it, so that when election time comes, they can use it for campaign fodder. It has to be for this reason because otherwise what's the pressing matter that stops them from actually planning for tomorrow so that, whatever dollars they do spend, there is an actual lifelong return on that investement. If the only pressing matter is that Center St BRT is bursting at the seams, well make that better until something can be built that is a scalable permanent solution. Translink runs 1 minute headway BRT, until we're doing that, it's not dire.
Another anecdote as well; after not using the C-Train for a while, I started again. You know something, I really didn't miss it and am really contemplating why I shouldn't just cough up the money in parking and gas to avoid it. Transit effectively doubles the travel time from driving in rushhour traffic all said and done and I never even take the bus. Building our own version of the Valley Line will reinforce that driving is the faster (and more comfortable) option and is worth the added individual cost.
I say this again, the city (and province) needs to take their time, have some vision, and do this right. And while they're at it, gaslight the federal government into being helpful, after all, they are environmentalists, or is that only when it is convenient for them to be?
