There’s no outrage. There’s acceptance. One wonders why there was so much hate for the Kitchener Waterloo lrt service and silence on this thread.
You should talk to the folks in KW about the LRT and they will tell you it was built in the wrong place and ppl will not ride it because of the routing. I agree with them and have walked every foot of the line. No issues going LRT, but needs to be in the right place.
It has no place in this thread as KW and Mississauga are 2 different cities and systems.
Very few post in this thread as they don't live in the city, ride the system nor understand it in the first place as well the city layout.
Land use is an big issue for the city starting with council as they only see density in a few areas and anything over 4-6 story is not welcome along major roads to support transit in the first place.
This system started me on my 23 years of being a transit advocate which I thought was an simple complaint at the time and turn out to be a tip of an ice berg. Over the years, the ice berg gotten smaller, but the current budget is making it larger like the past 6 years one.
Staff can only do so much with their hands tie by council that service will remain an issue until the 3rd garage is built to house another 100+ buses on day one on top of the existing fleet. $500 hundred million or more is needed to build that garage and outfitted for ebuses 100% considering it was supposed to been built over 10 years ago. To take it a step further, the Malton garage needs to be enlarge to support 250 buses from its current 100 max to the point a new one should be also be built to replace it.
The idea of moving to articulated bus fleet is moving crush load to crush load as how do you add these buses if there is no more space other than reducing the fleet? At the same time, these buses only last 12 years compare to the 15 for 40's at hundreds thousand more than a 40.
Going green is great if the money is there and council got a ticker shock when prices were coming in for the 2019-2022/23 fleet request and more so for the 2024 order. The HEV cost $300,000 more for the 2019 order and it costing another $300,000 per bus for the new fleet. Going to ebuses will be around $600,000 more per bus not including retrofitting the current garages.