[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Dado

And that makes them different from the City itself, how, exactly?

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.

It was the City that ripped out the streetcar lines. The City cheered on the removal of the railway lines. The RMOC proposed the creation of the Transitway where the NCC had proposed a rail system in the 1970s. The City has been sitting on an interprovincial rail bridge for years without doing anything with it, whether for transit or for overnight rail freight.

All true. But the city "cheered on" an NCC initiative in the case of the rail removal.

Oh, and let's not forget that both cities have continually ignored the existence of the other to the maximum extent possible in their respective transportation and transit planning while pre-amalgamation planning was far from conducive for transit-oriented planning (it's slightly better now, which isn't saying much).

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.

Perhaps... just perhaps... the NCC doesn't think the Ottawa River Parkway is the best place for an LRT line, which it probably isn't.

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

If the NCC hadn't bought out all those properties and extended the shoreline, the ORP wouldn't even exist as a viable rapid transit option, whether for BRT today or LRT tomorrow.

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

As for opposing busways across the Greenbelt, do you actually have any evidence for that?

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.

The NCC is a useless featherbed that has harmed more than it has helped.

The Southwest Transitway was built across the Greenbelt to Barrhaven and a corridor has been secured for the Cumberland Transitway past Blackburn Hamlet, and they have apparently agreed to widening of the Blair Rd corridor for the City's inadvisable Blair Transitway. Older transitways were built in NCC land, including both the Southwest Transitway (Lincoln Fields to Baseline) and the Southeast Transitway (most of it). The only place they have offered any kind of opposition was with respect to the plans for the West Transitway around Moodie

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?)...

Exactly who do you propose take on the tasks associated with being a capital city?

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.

Ottawa and Gatineau are clearly not up to the task.

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. And you wouldn't have thousands of hectares of land tied up in pointless "green" and "ceremonial" and other useless uses "for all Canadians".

Put up fourteen more flagpoles in a cornfield as a memorial to the NCC. There. You've brought the capital to Canadians. Now go abolish yourselves.

The City of Ottawa is busy engaging in an idiotic rearguard action against adding a third downtown station to its tunnel. And at least the NCC appears to have heard of the concept of landscape architecture

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.

if the City were in charge of Wellington or Confederation Square or Sussex Drive you can bet it would look as insipid as everything else the City does.

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.

They're kind of damned if they do, damned if they don't, aren't they?

Then they might as well not.

Look at it from the NCC's perspective: the City tends to treat the NCC as a reserve of land for its own purposes because it is too short-sighted to acquire and reserve land itself

Cities don't have the same revenue stream; it was dead easy for the NCC to acquire land in the expropriation-and-spend-happy 1960s and 1970s.

Other cities elsewhere have to plan and pay big bucks to acquire land for transportation infrastructure, but here in Ottawa the City just relies on taking it from the NCC.

In large measure because the NCC took it and has squatted on it for decades. If the NCC didn't exist, there wouldn't be those vast empires to begin with.

Letting buses use the NCC's driveways is not costless, either. Those roads have not been built to take the weight of buses, something that is just going to get worse with the double-deckers.

Why is the rest of Canada in the Ottawa road business to begin with?

Anywhere that buses stop frequently is particularly at risk of damage. The City had to pay to upgrade the ORP (rebuild the sub-base, base and increase the asphalt thickness) because of the damage the buses do but would they be as willing to do that on the Queen Elizabeth Driveway to Lansdowne?

Probably, and definitely if they owned that street, instead of, for some reason, "all Canadians".

You mentioned earlier the West LRT and the Parkway. Well guess what? Part of the former rail corridor between Cleary to Woodroffe was put on sale by the NCC in the 1990s.

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.

You can blame the NCC all you like for the Gréber Plan and its consequences, but in the last few decades since then it is the RMOC and then the City and even the MTO that are responsible for most of the transit-related messes we find ourselves in while the NCC has been, on balance, more accommodating than not.

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

The NCC needs to be abolished.