While Waterloo Regional council was voting in favour of a $790-million light rail system in Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph city council approved a work plan last week for a study of growth of this city’s transit system. The part of the study dealing with future “higher order” transit options will study two types of systems – bus rapid transit and light rail transit.

Prospects for light rail transit in Guelph aren’t known, but “if you don’t have the idea on the table, you can’t explore it,” said Ann Pappert, the city’s director of community services. Studying light rail “doesn’t mean it will make fiscal sense or that we’ll want to go there, but we have to look at it,” she said.

Bus rapid transit can involve such things as express bus lanes and measures to give buses priority over other vehicles at intersections, she noted.

Both light rail and rapid buses have been dismissed in Guelph in the past because of their cost and the city’s population and size, but some things have changed, Pappert said.

There have been changes in social values, fuel costs and global warming concerns, she said, as well as more of a focus at all government levels on more intensified use of land, energy conservation and alternative modes of transportation. “The framework has changed,” she said.

As well, there’s a changing regional context with Waterloo Region’s light transit plans, plans to bring GO trains to this area by 2011 and other factors, she said.

Pappert said a “very strong consulting team” has been assembled to do the study, which will also update the design of a new downtown transit terminal on Carden Street and review Guelph Transit’s mobility services.

Although bus rapid transit or light rail transit aren’t common in cities under 300,000 population, “the situation in Guelph is quite unique,” says the work plan prepared by one of the consultants. “The high ridership per capita combined with a reasonably compact urban form, infill opportunities and density at locations such as the downtown and university are opportunities to be explored.”

Given Guelph’s close proximity to major population centres, “higher order” transit services may be justified to link these urban areas, the work plan says. There is potential to use existing rail corridors to provide the foundation for a region-wide “higher order” transit service, it says.

The city-owned Guelph Junction Railway, currently used for freight and for tourist excursions, “is another corridor with potential for higher order transit service within Guelph and providing linkage from Guelph to Halton and the Milton GO service.”

While GO Transit has had great success since the 1970s as a commuter service to jobs near Toronto’s Union Station, the work plan says, planners are starting to explore the possibilities for the GO network to provide “higher order transit linkages for other origin-destination pairs.”

Satisfying the provincial Places to Grow strategy, which includes Guelph and Kitchener- Waterloo, “may well be the catalyst for the development of region-wide higher order transit services that provide greater self-containment and reduced reliance on automobile travel,” it says.