Strickland proposing change to rapid transit route

Regional Councillor Sean Strickland will make motions on the day Council is to vote on the Light Rail Transit plan to change the proposed route, and to get a partner to help build it.

Strickland submitted a memo during Council’s Planning and Works Committee meeting this morning that he will make a motion at the June 15 Council meeting to change the rapid transit route in Uptown Waterloo, whether it’s light rail or rapid buses.

Strickland says he took a walking tour along the proposed route in the Uptown, and says the northbound route between King & Allan and Erb & Albert, “will likely be the most complex and disruptive….interchange along the entire…route.”

Partly because it runs counter to one-way traffic on Erb Street, he says.

Strickland would rather see the route use the existing train tracks the Region already owns that cross King Street just north of the public square — doing that would save millions, he claims.

Strickland also wants the southbound route along Caroline Street redesigned.

He says such changes are minor in the larger scale of the rapid transit project, and should not pose any kind of delay for the LRT decision.

Strickland will also make a motion on June 15 that the Region partner with Ontario Infrastructure, a provincial crown corporation, to build an LRT system.

He says that agency has experience with this scale of infrastructure project, while the Region does not, and they may pick up some of the costs.

As for why Strickland is proposing these changes only at the very end of a lengthy debate and discussion process on LRT, he denies it’s a last-minute attempt to appease anti-LRT people.

He says some aspects the route have only come to light for him as he’s gone through the rapid transit discussion process, and that he’s only trying to be a responsible councillor and develop good value for taxpayers, whether Council winds up with an LRT or BRT project.

Here are some clips from Strickland’s interview with 570’s Mark Douglas…