Statement by Graham Jeffries

I am a supporter of the Hamilton LRT project. I moved to Hamilton for college after living in Calgary and Toronto and I immediately fell in love with the city. I decided to stay in Hamilton and invest as a community member, young career person, and a tax payer.

I rely on transit to live a comfortable life within budget. I find the HSR bus system along the Main and King corridor inefficient and untimely. With my experience riding LRT in Calgary I found the system consistently on time (a 5:10pm train came at 5:10pm). Rather than take the buses that were late and snarled in traffic, I would walk 20 minutes in -42C to the LRT. It was also very efficient at moving large volumes of people after Calgary Flames and Calgary Stampeders games, for whom I worked for. Seeing entire trains filled with fans was exciting and spirited too!

The system was very precise and not prone to interference with traffic. Delays were less than 15 minutes the vast majority of the time. It freed up the streets for emergency vehicles and a vibrant pedestrian mall and more places for public art. The C Train benefitted the businesses that surrounded the stations, each station having its own community and central node that sprung up. Some were arts and youth villages, others were malls and jump-offs to the warehouses by bus. It was very easy to navigate and get to places in Calgary purely by LRT, and now condos are springing up around the stations, adding to the tax base.

As a first year student at Mohawk I rented cheaply in downtown Hamilton. I routinely had two or three buses pass me, making me late for class. It became worth it to walk the 20 minutes to Macnab terminal to catch the buses that left on time. As a recent Mohawk graduate living in the Mohawk College area I had to purchase a car to get to my first career position, adding to congestion, hazards, and pollution. It was a 15 minute drive to work, a 55 minute to 1.5 hour bus ride, or a 35 minute bike ride from my home near Mohawk to my position in Ancaster. The HSR bus system in inefficient along the Main and King corridors due to traffic volume, on street parking, taxis, pedestrians, too many stops, as well as having to alight and manoeuvre for those in mobility devices, and traffic accidents. And it's only going to get worse!

With the increased population expectancy of Hamilton, the bus system is only going to experience more problems - more pollution, more expenses for more drivers, more congestion due to more buses and more people driving, more stress on already stretched tax dollars, and more adversity from developers.

I strongly support the LRT plan as well as a robust planning bylaw structure for mixed use and medium-to-high density along the LRT corridor. I believe it will benefit businesses, students and employees, traffic, the impoverished and disabled, the local economy, the sense of communities, tax revenue, and development.

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