On May 1, 2013 the City finally (after a near 1 yr silence)
convened the 5th meeting of the public consultation group (PCG) for
the W-LRT route selection study. The CCC has been
participating all along in this process and indicated our
disappointment that the public open house held the week before occurred before the
PCG meeting. This was not the 1st time this has happened and the
City acknowledged this was not the way things are supposed to be
done.
At this PCG meeting the City reiterated the proposal already
presented at the public open house of their new preferred
route now called the Richmond Underground or 'green' line.
It was
quite apparent that there is no interest whatsoever on the
part of the City to consider the possibility of a Carling routing
for the W-LRT.
The position that
the CCC presented at this May 1st PCG meeting is that the manner in
which the City could develop in the next 20-50 year time horizon
could be considerably different if the W-LRT took a northerly route
(Parkway-Richmond) versus a southerly route (Carling). Because
of the magnitude of this city building potential, a detailed picture
of what these differences could be like in the 20-50 year time
horizon and a city-wide debate on the costs/benefits of these
differences was warranted. It is our view that nothing of this
sort has occurred to date.
For more details on what was discussed at the meeting regarding
the new proposed Richmond Underground route and why the
Carling Ave route has been discounted, visit our
W-LRT project page.
Considering the level of detail that the public has been
provided and engaged in for other large infrastructure projects
(Downtown LRT, East End Interprovincial Bridge, Lansdowne
re-development), the transparency in the case of the W-LRT route
selection is sorely lacking.
This leaves one to speculate on possible reasons why the
process has been so poor for this project. On multiple
occasions the City has mentioned that the available transit funding
'envelope' over the next 20 year horizon is fixed and limited and as
a result any increase in costs for building the inside-the-Greenbelt
components of the system (such as this W-LRT segment) means less
money available for extending later to the 'outside-the-greenbelt'
portions. It seems plausible that once again suburban priorities are
trumping urban ones and that doing it on the cheap to get out to the
edge of the Greenbelt is more important than doing it
right.
