Light Rail Transit

Light Rail Transit will be a decision of Regional Council, which means that no Ward 6 candidate will get a vote on this proposal. However, a nine percent increase on regional property taxes is not affordable. I believe our regional councillors must revisit the plan and find a way to build a rapid transit line that we can afford.

As a resident who chooses to uses transit on a regular basis, I understand the challenges of getting across this City and this Region. I know that some routes are not well used, but that the major routes in Waterloo fill-up during peak hours and are still well-used throughout the day. This is particularly true for the routes along King St., which is why some form of rapid transit is required in the next few years.

Regardless of what technology the Region decides to use when building a rapid transit line, the City of Waterloo can and should make the zoning changes necessary to ensure that whatever is implemented is as successful as possible. It must also demand better transit service that allows people to more easily get from place to place across our City and our Region.

A revised transit plan, whether or not it includes light rail, must ensure that the 35,000 people that will move to the City of Waterloo over the next 20 years have an incentive to live near the central core and use transit more often. Otherwise, all of those new people will be in cars on the road in front of all of us while we’re on our way to work, to hockey practice, or to the store. Without such a plan, we would need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars across the Region widening our major roads, and the suburbs of Toronto show us that longer, wider roads encourage more urban sprawl and lead to slower, not faster, commutes.

I am encouraged that the Region has also approved a transportation master plan that will deliver better transit service along major north-south and east-west corridors to bring more people into the core faster, such as along Fischer-Hallman, and Erb and University.  This will help build ridership to support whatever form of rapid transit is implemented.

Finally, I appreciate the support that I have found in the community for accessible, affordable, and effective public transit. As your councillor, I would have the experiential knowledge of the system to demand that better decisions are made that will work for this community. It does not include nine percent regional property tax increases for the current light rail transit plan, but it does mean we use the federal and provincial money we have been allocated wisely to build for the future.