Quote of the Day: “No one likes to admit being mistaken but, under the incentives and constraints of profit and loss, there is often no choice but to reverse course before financial losses threaten bankruptcy. In politics, however, the costs of the government’s mistakes are often paid by the taxpayers, while the costs of admitting mistakes are paid by elected officials.” Thomas Sowell
At the beginning of my career, I had a job at a consulting firm in Toronto. For 2.5 years, I drove from K-W to the firm. It was a very gruelling experience and I basically burned out my car over those years. The only train service that was running at the time was CN – but it left the Kitchener station (as I recall) at about 6:30am and got in to Union Station at around 8:30am. It stopped maybe 4 or 5 times – I don’t remember. It left Toronto at 4:30pm and got in after 6pm. If you missed the 4:30pm train, I think the next one was around 11pm. It was expensive (for me…) so I rarely took it. So, even though there has always been train travel between the two cities, I still drove my little car back and forth since it was so much easier and more convenient. Cheyenne Bholla has an article today on the Front Page about the never ending story of “All-Day” GO Train service between the Region and Union Station. She points to the incremental steps and different projects that are ongoing to build the infrastructure to make this happen. There is still a huge amount of money and resources needed to make this service happen including “…the rest of the funding [from the Region] needed for the $106-million project, beyond the $43 million the province has agreed to pay.” Ouch. And good for Bholla for actually driving this project back to reality by giving us the actual amount of train travel vs vehicle travel between the two regions. A huge number of commuters are going to need to start taking the train for this project to even pretend to be nothing but a white elephant.
And speaking of white elephants, I was stopped where Erb and Bridgeport Streets meet the other day for the ION to pass. It took about 3 minutes by the time the gates first went down, the train to pass and then the gates to finally go back up. I was fourth in line. I looked back and counted a total of 19 cars waiting on the train. There were three (yea, 3…) people on the $1.5 Billion boondoggle. So, maybe 25 people had to wait 3 minutes (or 75 minutes total) so 3 people could ride the train. Pathetic.