[lrt's friend]

Replacing the Transitway for these sections would offer better service, and better speed, which would increase ridership.

Why would that be true? You are already providing good fast service on the Transitway. Speeding it up by a few minutes is not going to make a whole lot of difference. We have already largely captured this customer base. We need to draw new customers by providing new routes, cutting travel times to new destinations significantly. Its when we can cut transit travel times by 25% or 50%, then you will start drawing new riders. There are all kinds of examples where it takes excessive amounts of times to travel between locations by transit. My own is a perfect example. 10 minutes by car, 50 minutes by transit. You should be able to cut this by 50% simply by providing more direct routes and more frequent service.

I think people who live in the older parts of Ottawa don't realize how badly the southern tier of the city is choking on traffic and there is a lack of transit alternatives. Even then, transit is not viable because it also gets caught in the same traffic. The Albion Road issue is a symptom of the traffic problem. The Airport parkway is a mess and is failing to serve its original purpose to provide fast access to the airport. Hunt Club Road has many bottlenecks at various points, so bad, that traveling almost downtown to the Queensway is often faster. Remember the debat about travelling between South Keys and Scotiabank Place. Hunt Club is more direct but the Queensway was significantly faster. Very nice to direct cross-town traffic through Centretown neighbourhoods! I am sure that there are many other examples of traffic chaos in the southern tier of the city.

A coworker complained today about the awful traffic crossing town from Richmond via Manotick. Can you imagine, traffic problems this far south? And we continue to offer no alternatives. If we don't, we will soon face demands for massive road expansion. At what cost?

Low ridership and extremely high cost and minimal return on investment? No wonder it was voted down.

It got voted down because it was allowed to become a political issue. Both Alex Munter and Larry O'Brien used the issue to court voters in the east and west end of the city. We also had some very selfish councillors, who didn't understand that by voting it down, we were delaying not only that route, but also the east-west route. If we had gone ahead, we would be planning right now the first east-west route. This was Bob Chiarelli's vision and he had the track record to get it done. Instead, we voted him out of office and we have rolled the clock back on LRT by years.

Talking about high costs, your skytrain proposal is going to be far more expensive. Funny, that you are bringing this up.

For me it's the opposite, how a waste of money it was. It's still in the field, and the E-W, parallels the existing tracks, out of reach of major destinations. It's akin of the Rapibus in Gatineau, how can you spend more money on something that's already there.

Hmmmm. And laying track on the Transitway is not the same thing? Its already there, isn't it? It already provides very good service, doesn't it? We cannot achieve the quality of service by restricting ourselves to using the existing track that you mention. For the cost, Rapidbus is going to offer much more frequent service than what would be possible on a shared use heavy rail line. The east-west route used the existing rail corridor but was to deviate from it to access major transit destinations such as Algonquin College. It was also going to be a true rapid transit line by providing both fast and frequent service to places that people wanted to travel to. Using the existing single track was going to restrict the level of service and the quality of the destinations, the so-called fields that you often mention.