Wise investments can lead to great Cambridge GO service

Re: ‘Hope’ for GO to Cambridge — Jan. 18

With Cambridge’s Kathryn McGarry now serving as Minister of Transportation, it is a key time for Cambridge’s municipal and federal leaders to join in discussing the unnamed but equally important part of that role: Minister of Transformation. With a slow rollout of GO to Kitchener — and even more challenges for Cambridge being without provincial control of railway corridor, or a central terminal for trains to use — we have time to understand the weighting factors which determine where GO, goes.

Today, GO and other transportation systems shape communities around them. Investments in them are with an eye toward two-way service to maximize train efficiency, and that requires people close by or within easy multimodal access to the station. The work happening in Kitchener to make this a sound investment — an integrated LRT to ferry people into and out from the station in both morning and evening, dense development around the site to supply train riders for one direction and space for jobs for the other — are the complex interconnected realities we can’t disregard and say ‘no’ to, if we expect to be taken seriously.

Chipping away at all the reasons to create a GO link would make it a poor investment for anyone, but together we have and know perfectly well the tools which can make Cambridge GO trains the most can’t-miss opportunity for the province, but only if we are willing to invest smartly in ourselves. Andrew Dodds Kitchener