I am happy for KWC residents. But I really don't get what's all that unique about ION beyond KWC just being smaller than average in North America for LRT. Elsewhere, it would be perfectly normal for a city of half a million to have an LRT. The real test will be to show they have the ridership to justify the ~$900 million spent. Because if the ridership isn't spectacular there will be lots of communities asking if they should bother with LRT until they have a million residents. And it's definitely debatable. $900 million spent on BRT and tons of new buses would also have done a lot.
Ottawa is unique for showing the scalability of transit. I think Ottawa has sort of shown the path to building transit for small and medium cities. Deploy BRT relatively easily and quickly and reserve the corridors early. Build grade separations where possible cheaply. And then convert to rail when ridership and/or limitations warrant it. Successful conversion to LRT for half the rapid transit network after Stage 2 would be a huge validation of their strategy. In a decade and a half they will have built 56 km of grade separated rail transit. That would be an accomplishment anywhere. Even beyond the low standards of Canada and the US.
iON didn't even get full provincial funding, rather 300 million. KW had to fork over a billion dollars to pay for the thing themselves (which includes operation & maintenance costs over for 30 years). A 300M grant is nothing for the province.
Davis Drive is a completely comical waste of cash, I don't think many are denying that.
Davis was so wildly expensive however as it had huge property requirements, and was a full rebuild of the corridor - retaining walls, full utilities, etc, along with top tier public realm elements. It's nowhere near the same type of project that Ion is..
Ion is a bare bones LRT infrastructure system that more closely resembles a streetcar than a total rapid transit system. It has minimal to no public realm improvements, featuring basic concrete sidewalks, essentially 0 soft landscaping to the rebuilt streets, etc.
The Ion system is completely fine for KWC - they went for an expensive LRT system for a project that won't exactly have crazy high demand at first. It'll do fine by US standards for ridership, but really won't be a high use system. The good news is that most growth in KWC seems to be very LRT friendly these days, ridership should only grow.
I don't think you actually understand the scale of work that was required here either. Sure, it's bare bones, but I guarantee that it has more grade separation than Hurontario, Finch, and Hamilton will have. Half the line has to integrate with class I freight, lots of underground infrastructure had to be relocated, 1 rail grade separation had to be built, a freeway bridge had to be rebuilt, new lighting had to be installed everywhere, and a hydro corridor had to be buried. Sure, property acquisitions weren't as big of an expenditure, but there was still a huge amount that was involved with this project. We're just lucky enough in KW to have a shortline railroad that ran from Uptown Waterloo through the universities and exit very close to the Waterloo Bus terminal.
The basic concrete sidewalks thing is a lie and if you go pretty much anywhere along the corridor you'll see tessellated concrete, streetscape improvements (including new and replanted trees), and (within hopefully a few months), about a half dozen pieces of public art. There was no real need to add soft landscaping because both major urban cores (Uptown Waterloo and Downtown Kitchener) had previously been completely redone themselves before the project began. It's also worth noting that a good portion of this line runs along freight short-lines, meaning that the walkability of the surrounding area is mediocre at best.
Out of curiosity, what defines "high use"? Must we demand 10K PPHPD ridership for all light rail lines in the country, especially when light rail tends to begin to have problems at around 4-5K PPHPD? For a frequency of 7.5 minutes, this system will have a capacity of 1.5K PPHPD, it was never meant to be a huge transportation corridor, it was meant to prevent future overcrowding of the King St Bus Routes, restructure/simplify the bus network (which is extremely confusing here because of the road network and generally bad placement of bus terminals), serve as an anchor for tech worker transportation (of which, Metrolinx isn't really helping out), and spur development. Of these tasks, it will or has performed all these tasks quite well.
Had the vehicles not had teething problems and the region not gotten lazy with the project, the line would be running now and would probably be the greatest transit engineering success story in the last 20 years in Ontario. It's pretty much on budget, it's performing its intended tasks, it will not be under built or overbuilt, and most importantly, it was (comparatively) cheap. They engineered this thing well to ensure that it would serve its community well.
I really dont agree with this.
There are many USA cities with LRT with the population of Kitchener/Waterloo.
Cleveland has a population of 325,000 and they have a subway!
Newark NJ has 285,154
Cincinnati 301,301
Jersey City 270,753
Buffalo 258,612
All have streetcars/Light rail
Every city mentioned is a rustbelt city with a population today that is significantly lower than what it was 30+ years ago (when each of these systems were built with the exception of Cincinnati), plus they also have larger metro areas. The KW LRT is only serving 350K -ish people because it only serves KW (and not Cambridge), and more importantly, it's a new system built at a time of growth for the city, and really early on in the city's growth.
Waterloo does not have a population of 565K, it has a population of 115K, Kitchener has a population of 240K. Just because the region (which includes Cambridge, Elmira, New Hamburg, Breslau, St. Jacobs, and a bunch of other townships) has a population of 565K does not mean the city itself served by the LRT does. A better argument could be made that the Universities bring in close to 50K students which could be added on, but still, 400K is much lower than what these cities had in their heyday.
