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Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere
Alberta's infrastructure is generally excellent as well, with strong transit and road networks for the level of demand. Same with the Maritimes with their large road networks.
The infrastructure deficits are most acute in Ontario, BC, and Manitoba, IMO. All 3 are short on road infrastructure, though Ontario has a decent network its very undersized for it's population, and BC / Manitoba roads are just very substandard for a developed nation. Transit in Vancouver is better, but basically non-existent in Winnipeg and again woefully undersized in Ontario for the population.
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I will leave it to the Quebec City people to comment on utilization and priorities in their own town but if they don't need anything there why did they go through the many years of planning exercises? It seems unhealthy to me to generate plan after plan with elaborate materials and public consultation only to end up with an unrealistically high budget.
One thing that stands out to me about Canada is rare it is to get beyond utilitarian terms in discussions. The older parts of Quebec City are one of the gems in Canada and in many other developed countries those areas would have some kind of premium infrastructure like an underground metro-like service to get traffic off the narrow and winding streets. It's not just about bus capacity being maxed out or economies of scale and saving dollars.
I don't know about all of the Maritimes but if you are in metro Halifax which has about 1/4 of the total population there it doesn't really help that there are large twinned highways out in the rural areas of NS. Halifax often shows up near the top of the some of the worst traffic lists and has some traffic apocalypse days with gridlock around most of the core of the city. It along with Moncton is the fastest-growing city in the country right now, and due to the older road network and topography the options for things like BRT are limited. It's impossible to know what future migration patterns will look like but the current trajectory if it continues will require a major transit overhaul.
Another one I find odd is the idea that you need to triage different parts of the country and move down the list. The construction and planning capacity between regions is separate and a lot of the funding is separate. The feds meanwhile overspend on all kinds of areas; if we had priorities in order I don't think there would be some dilemma between investing in different regions that would require heavy triage. In some cases the feds do show up with the transit funding and it gets bogged down at the provincial or municipal level.