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Comment by robertelder | Hacker News Reader

Waterloo has been investing heavily in improving their public transit infrastructure in recent years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_rapid_transit

http://rapidtransit.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/projectinformatio...

Once it is completed, I think this will make Waterloo and Toronto feel a lot closer together. Note that the 'transit hub' mentioned above is a 2 minute walk from communitech (https://www.communitech.ca/), Google, Shopify, D2L etc.

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Those are local projects (Waterloo/Kitchener/Cambridge), right? Are they actually planning on improving the very slow and intermittent rail connection to Toronto?

Yes, these are local projects, but with the amount of chaos they're creating with construction, I'm willing to believe that once it's finished they'll make much more frequent trips to Toronto. I believe there would be demand for it as the King/Victoria area is changing rapidly. Google just took over a building that was an old derelict factory with broken windows 2 years ago. This building is within feet of the proposed transit station. Lots of new apartment buildings going up in the area. The communitech hub has also been getting much more busy in the last few years.

Communitech is about to get a lot busier too... They've expanded into the old Google space and there are potential tenants going on tours through it every 10 minutes.

OK, so they might have a few more frequent trips, but the train itself still takes an hour and a half. And even if you assume this horrendous construction makes traveling within the KW region magically fast, you're still talking a 1 hour 45 minutes commute, each way.

I think Toronto will still be pretty far away.

That hangs on whether or not Metrolinx can purchase the rail between Georgetown to Bramalea.

http://www.metrolinx.com/en/projectsandprograms/corridorowne...

This article states that they want to bring 2-way all day service... someday.

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