Rapid Transit

[ScreamingViking]

Originally Posted by Doady

It's sad how much public transit in Hamilton has been neglected since the 90s. In the past 10 years, the per capita transit ridership of Hamilton has fallen even behind Mississauga and Brampton Transit. That's just ridiculous and LRT won't reverse this decline. London, Winnipeg and Quebec City don't need LRT either. I hope for LRT in Hamilton but LRT is just such a small part of building successful transit and building healthy and vibrant downtowns. The transit system of Hamilton should be 30% bigger than it is now and the province and the lack of LRT are really not the main reasons for that. If Hamilton had transit ridership on par with London (60 riders per capita instead of 45), the case for LRT would have been even harder to ignore, and the LRT probably would have already been built by now.

You want LRT? Then start investing in buses. Start laying the foundation for LRT. No LRT can exist in isolation. Plenty of US systems build LRT and then neglect buses, LRT expansion motivated by anti-bus attitudes, and so transit ridership decline down there continues. No matter what Hamilton eventually builds, LRT or BRT or nothing, the City of Hamilton needs to invest in major expansion of its bus services.

About 30 years ago there were massive cuts to the local transit system, due (I believe) because of provincial funding cuts. The HSR was drastically reduced in fleet size and routes/scheduling. Ridership subsequently shrank in a big way as well. I often wonder where things would be today if those cuts had not happened.

Investment in transit is every local politician's favourite "need", but when it comes time to step up and vote for that investment many of them find a reason to put things off. Hence a 10-year plan that was approved several years ago, which is now 2 or 3 years delayed. Yet the road expansions seem to pass without a sweat. They're needed too in many cases, but the difference in attitudes toward what are complementary forms of transportation is laughably large.

In the early 1980s Hamilton city council also passed on a "skytrain" type system the province was willing to build (fully-funded) to demonstrate its investment in technology. Neighbourhood opposition was fierce, but the city council of the day was probably even more reticent about such projects than the current one is. Had the initial line been built, I have no doubt it would have been expanded across more parts of the city. Instead we saw Vancouver embrace the technology and improve its own transit system, which continues to be expanded as the decades pass.

It's frustrating.