Time for rail transit that actually works

RE: RAIL TRANSIT

If you spend enough time in a class that touches on psychology, you will come across the term Sunk Cost Fallacy and the more you learn about it, the more it begins to resemble the province’s approach to rail transit.

Some amount of pomp and circumstance surrounded the announcement of the Confederation GO Station, and yet the elephant in the room is that there will be no all-day service for some time, like every other Hamilton GO Station, for the simple reason that the GO Train is based on a fundamentally flawed principle. That is, borrowing freight lines for transit. Ride any GO train line, and it becomes painfully apparent that those tracks are designed for freight, and people are not freight. Instead of making the courageous decision to establish a peoplecentric, discrete rail transit system, consecutive governments have continued to sink money into a system that has done nothing to remove the necessity of owning a car in Southern Ontario.

It’s time to stop wasting money on a system that will never fully work, and start building a system that will, because the traffic on our highways is not getting better. With traffic costing us over $3 billion a year, this problem is fast becoming too expensive to ignore.

Look east, look west, there are cities with higher populations than Southern Ontario, that manage to move people around more effectively and more efficiently than our transit system ever has.

Wesley Schlarb, Hamilton