There’s a lot of criticism of the Region’s rapid transit proposal. It’s a little disheartening, because when I was actually at the rapid transit open houses, it sounded like everyone was more or less on the same page. But then we get editorials like this one in the Record, wherein the author tempts poor people—the supposed beneficiaries of the rapid transit proposal—with free hybrid cars as an alternative to an expensive government infrastructure project.
It’s a straw man. Sorry, poor people, nobody’s going to give you cars.
But what’s disheartening here is that the criticism completely misses the point. Rapid transit, shockingly, isn’t about transit at all, really. Let’s back up a step.
Waterloo region has a fundamental (yet desirable) problem:
- We’re growing. Fast.
- There’s no place left to expand our default “urban sprawl” development strategy.
The region, at the behest of the province, is choosing to “grow up, not out”. Rapid transit is a key part of what makes that possible.
Continuing on more or less as we have been means we’ll need unrestrained urban sprawl to facilitate growth. It means Wellesley, Wilmot and Woolwich become giant, sprawling house fields, with all the roads and infrastructure needed to maintain such.
In order to avoid that, you need to build up urban areas. Urban areas people actually want to live and work in. Places where it’s going to be impossible to find a parking spot, much less a permanent garage.
We don’t have this yet. That’s the point. It’s going to take concerted political will to get us there. Lucky for us, there seems to be a bit of that, which is why the idea of an $800M rapid transit system wasn’t immediately laughed off the agenda when it was proposed to senior governments.
The LRT is part of a larger strategy called Transit-Oriented Development. It’s not a crazy theory—it’s been executed successfully elsewhere, and not just in Europe, but also in such non-exotic locales as Toronto or Calgary.
The author of the article is right in one sense: owning a car in this town is a necessity right now. I don’t think it should be. Rapid transit is part of a broader strategy to ensure that, twenty years from now, it isn’t.
I don’t want to have to own a car, even though I can well afford one. Do you?
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