This is one of those persistent insanely frustrating issues. Frequency beyond Brampton is NICE, but reverse commute to Kitchener, has been for decades and all parties have been dragging their feet.
I wish it was only foot dragging over a controversial plan that eventually won the day.
The actual history was worse.
There was an EA done around 2009 which laid out a quite reasonable path forward to double track west of Georgetown. There was also work done in that era to plan triple tracking through Brampton. All of this was to build on the Georgetown South project, which was called "South" because it was to do the required preparatory work east of Bramalea to accommodate a high quality GO service all the way to Kitchener. Georgetown South, along with the West Toronto Diamond, actually got put into play via the GO Trip initiative. There were a few embellishments - ie the Weston Trench was added - but the plan was pretty clear and well laid out. For an example, see this
ML Board Document from 2009.
But then came Kathleen Wynne and ML who announced first RER, and then Union Pearson Express. UPE was a vanity project that was a must-do commitment to attract the 2015 Pan-Am games. With UP becoming must-do for 2015, money that would have been used to improve GO was diverted to overspends attributable to problems in the UPE realm. The planned GO expansion was deferred and downgraded.
Then came an even more grandiose 2014 election promise to build an HSR line to KW. That promise was so out of the blue that then-Transport Minister Glenn Murray had to rush out to KW to explain to the municipal pols that it was just an aspiration and nothing would actually be in the works for several years.
Of course, no one had cinched any of this up with CN, who became increasingly opposed to the appropriation of their freight assets for passenger trains. That led first to a stalemate negotiation re adding track to the Halton Subdivision, and when that went nowhere, the equally grandiose Missing Link was proposed to give CN a new completely separate line. That led to two years of new studies and negotiations to try and get CN on side.
Of course, as this progressed, it became apparent that the price tag was out of reach. So the whole thing was stillborn. If one reviews the amount of money actually spent on KW GO during the Wynne years, it's apparent that nothing - even simple incremental things like fixing the Guelph slow order - was ever seriously pursued.
And then Doug Ford entered the picture, to the horror of many of us. Oddly, Ford seems to have endorsed a basic, feet-on-the-ground expansion. CN appears to have been mollified, Money is flowing and construction crews are out there on the line.
I'm sure there were backroom twists and turns that we don't even know about.... but even with what we know, it has been ten years of false starts, grandiose announcements, studies and restudies, restatements and changes in direction...and bloody little actually getting done.
But that's transit planning in Ontario for you.
- Paul
