[Dado]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

The city would have no gumption about running transit lines - bus, rail, magic jitneys - across the Greenbelt. That's a non-starter for the NCC.

There are four-and-a-half such rail corridors they can use for those purposes, two-and-a-half of which they own (the O-Train corridor extension and the former Carleton Place Sub through Kanata South along with the Renfrew Sub to Carp & Arnprior which starts half way through the Greenbelt) and don't use.

I'd be willing to bet good money that the City would not have the gumption to use the Carleton Place Sub for transit - any kind - despite having bought it for that purpose.

And the NCC did sweet fanny adams to act as the co-ordinator they now aspire to be. Hell, they even got in on the transit planning game a decade too late. So to hell with them.

They tried in the 1970s. They were rebuffed by municipalities on both sides of the river who thought they were better equipped to do transit planning. Look at how well that turned out.

Yes, they're a bit late, but it's understandable, too: one would have thought that the turn-of-the-millennium amalgamations on both sides of the river would have led to better transit planning, but instead we just got more of the same BRT-focused transit planning with some LRT bobbles on the side.

I agree, it isn't. But the NCC isn't opposing [the West LRT] on those [planning] grounds; it's opposing them because it's an interference with its stupid precious green space fixation, going back decades.

There are locals opposing it on those grounds, but not so sure the NCC is. As it happens, I've spoken with the NCC's representative on transit in other circumstances and I just do not get the impression that they are being obstructive in the way you're claiming.

We also haven't even had a single open house for the West LRT yet

The old CPR alignment would also probably still exist in that case.

It might, but given that the rest of the line got ripped out in the 1990s and the line to which it meets is being ripped out now too, it might not, either. Its only value would really have been for passenger service, and CP got out of that in the late 1970s with the introduction of VIA. That line would have value so long as VIA continued to operate through the Ottawa Valley to western Canada, but again that ceased in the 1990s, so the track quite possibly would have been lifted with the rest of it in the 1990s.

All we do know is that in our history, the City didn't acquire it. It doesn't matter particularly that it was the NCC that held it: the point is the City didn't seize the opportunity to acquire it and that fact cannot be blamed on the NCC.

Yip. Old news articles from the 80s and 90s. The NCC made it as difficult as possible. They were obstructionist. They have never been fans of public transit, even as the federal government pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into transit projects into other cities.

That's not possible: there were no plans for busways across the Greenbelt in the 1980s. The RMOC at that time was quite content to use shoulder bus lanes on provincial highways.

In the 1990s the RMOC carried out studies for both the Southwest Transitway to Barrhaven and the West Transitway to Kanata. The latter was slated to use a combination of road allowance from the Hwy 417 corridor and from Corkstown Rd, so the NCC never even entered into it. The latter did call for NCC land, but they don't seem to have had much trouble getting it in the end.

Wrong. The NCC was a roadblock on the southeast transitway project, the southwest, one of the park-and-rides (can't recall which one right off hand; Eagleson?)...

The Southwest Transitway starts at Lincoln Fields and goes south from there to Baseline Station, whereupon it uses bus lanes on Woodroffe to just south of Hunt Club, after which it re-enters a transitway built in the early 2000s to the west of Woodroffe crossing the Greenbelt to Fallowfield and which has recently been extended to the hopelessly optimistically-named Barrhaven Town Centre. There are only two P&Rs along the SW Twy: a small one at Baseline and a large one at Strandherd.

The NCC may have roadblocked the Lincoln Fields - Baseline portion long ago, but they did not do anything much to oppose the segment built across the Greenbelt... heck, it's even separated from Woodroffe by an unnecessarily wide expanse of grass and ditch which the NCC could have been usefully obstructionist about.

What are those tasks? When it comes to land use and planning and such, let the city do it. Let the RCMP block of streets for presidential motorcades. Canadian Heritage can keep putting up the flags and banners. Give Gatineau Park and Mer Bleue to Parks Canada. Pave the rest of the goddamn "green belt".

I fail to see what these "tasks" are that only the secretive, unaccountable, uncontrolled NCC is up to doing.

Most capital cities have some sort of central government agency with a mandate to coordinate capital city functions, including acquiring land for state use.

In some respects, the NCC has been kicked out of these functions with PWGSC taking them over, which has not at all been to the improvement of the urban realm in Ottawa.

In large measure because the NCC has usurped many of there roles in large swathes of the city. If the NCC didn't exist, those roles would be assumed, properly, by local government.

Being a capital city is not a role for local government. How various institutions and manifestations of the state relate to each other in the capital is quite properly a role for the central government. That includes things like the national war memorial, for instance.

Yes: MOAR GRASS. Ottawa could use less landscape architecture, and more architecture. The green fixation is a nasty, horrible by-product of the NCC's existence.

Newsflash: Wellington and Sussex Drive, thanks to the NCC, are already more insipid than what would have been developed in city that was allowed to grow more organically, instead of according to some pointless "national interest" master plan. Confederation Boulevard is a joke.

I'm not talking about the NCC's grass fixation, which the City itself has in spades too. The quality of materials used along Confederation Boulevard's sidewalks is far higher than what we would get with the City in charge. The NCC - today - shows far greater originality in how it landscapes even things like boulevard medians (granite cobbles, hedges, shrubs, raised planters) than does the City. The area in front of the new convention centre would probably have ended up being filled with concrete had the City been put in charge. The NCC maintains gardens that the City probably is incapable of maintaining.

The City of Ottawa is way too suburban (i.e. like Andy Haydon's Nepean) in its thinking due to its roots in the heavily suburban-oriented RMOC (where Andy Haydon also ran the show for years). The NCC's thinking is different in that regard - it harkens more back to Garden City and City Beautiful. It's not exactly what one would regard as truly urban, but it's not suburban, either.

How did the NCC acquire it, and when? And why didn't the NCC consider building a rail transit system worthy of a national capital to be in the interest of "all Canadians"? If they did, we wouldn't have the problem of buying land from the NCC, speculative investor.

The NCC acquired that bit of railway in the 1960s. Neither City nor NCC were thinking of rail transit systems at that time, unfortunately. In the 1970s, the NCC did in fact come up a plan to build a rail transit system.

If the land had remained in CP's hands until the 1990s you can bet that they would have charged far more for it than would the NCC (see what problems Vancouver has getting its hands on CP corridors).

Short-sightedness, and active undermining, are two very different things. The NCC has been doing the latter.

The NCC needs to be abolished.

The City has been actively undermining effective rail transit at least as much as the NCC and arguably a lot more. It wasn't the NCC that came up with the Transitway concept; they came up with a region-wide rail transit plan that was panned by the RMOC in the 1970s in favour of the BRT system the RMOC came up with. It's not the NCC who got in the way of the first attempt in the 1990s to use the rail corridor the O-Train now uses: the RMOC did that. And it's not the NCC that is hell-bent on not using the Prince of Wales Bridge for rail: that's the City, again.

Abolishing the NCC won't change has happened in the past and there is no reason to believe that the City will suddenly become saner if the NCC is abolished, either.


You seem to mention a lot of "old news" in regards to the NCC, i.e. what the NCC did in the 1960s when it pulled out the railways, built grassy parkways for cars and established the Greenbelt, which you then use to support the call to abolish the NCC. The NCC hasn't done anything like that for decades now and about the only thing that comes even close is the proposed Kettle Island bridge route, which for some reason seems to be fairly widely supported anyway.

As things stand today, given the immediate past of the last decade, I find the Cities of Ottawa and Gatineau to be far more of a problem to getting a decent transit system than the NCC. I'd put the MTO and the MTQ higher up the list right now.


As far as I'm concerned, all transit and major transportation planning in the region (including the provincial highways as well planning for VIA, the airport, future HSR) should be handed over to an agency operating under the auspices of the NCC with representation from the two cities and the two provinces. If, by some miracle, the national capital region can finally become its own province/territory/district outside provincial oversight, that transportation agency can be absorbed into the new government.