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Originally Posted by someone123
I think the growth and the unpredictability of migration in Canada does make planning more difficult as well. So many plans even from the 2010's look silly in the 2020's. I would argue that there's a philosophical issue with trying to plan too heavily and a practical issue of inefficient and slow implementation, but slower growth would make these problems more manageable. Part of the problem these days is so many Canadian cities are just not set up for the pace of change they're experiencing, going all the way from the mindset of voters and councillors to provinces that didn't plan for the growth and should be tackling it in a qualitatively different way and a federal government that mostly does ad hoc cost sharing.
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I guess one of the silver linings of the Federal government dialing population growth up to 11 is that it has led provincial and municipal governments to make drastic changes to infrastructure investment and zoning reform that they never would have otherwise.
Exclusive SFH zoning almost fell as quickly and unexpectedly as the Berlin wall in many of our major cities the last two years. I honestly didn't expect that to happen for another decade, even with the affordability crisis. Right now, there's not much of an effect for two reasons: one is that population growth is so ridiculous that it doesn't make a dent, and the second is that interest rates are high and labour supply in construction is low, so this hasn't resulted in many projects getting off the ground. But when immigration goes back to normal levels (which I think will happen regardless of who's in charge within a decade) and when interest rates fall, at least we've cleared this regulatory hurdle.
Same with transportation - at least here in the GTA (and to a lesser extent in Vancouver as well). There are a lot of big investments that probably wouldn't have been made if population growth was low. If you look at American cities which are now growing at European levels, they're not making any investments in transportation infrastructure at all, and actually letting their public transit networks rot. It's kind of sad that North American cities either build but not fast enough for growth, or let their infrastructure stagnate or decline if they're not growing quickly. They're always behind where they should be. Given these two scenarios, I'd rather be building something rather than nothing. At least when our growth tapers off we'll have relatively modern transportation infrastructure that meets more of our contemporary needs.
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Canada doesn't tend to implement repeatable standardized transit projects for example.
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We have this to some extent, but only intra-provincially. Calgary and Edmonton essentially built the same LRT system at the same time. More recently, a lot of Ontario's LRT procurements were bundled together - not just the Metrolinx ones, but KW's Ion was part of the same order of vehicles for the Eglinton Crosstown.
But, yes, in true Canadian fashion, every province has to reinvent the wheel for themselves. This is probably the most glaring in Ottawa, which is the only large city region that straddles a provincial border. If a tramway gets built in Gatineau, it won't be compatible to the O-train and will have to run on the street a block instead of interlining in the existing tunnel a block south. The Trillium Line O-train ends about 1 km south of where Gatineau's Rapibus corridor ends on the other side of the Ottawa river; there's a bridge and ROW that would link these two (since they were part of the same, old rail corridor) but it's a pedestrian bridge with no future transit plans.
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Even if ships and barges don't get you everywhere you want to go, if Hong Kong had the room to build multi-lane expressways, Hong Kong certainly had the room to build freight rail which would take up a fraction of the space.
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