Ken Gray: NIMBY watch

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Harley613

LIGHT RAIL:

OMG!!!!!! CHILD-KILLING OVERHEAD WIRES!!!!!!

There is no sin greater than overhead wires! WIRES! WIRES!!!!!!!!

[Harley613]

HA! I was looking for the 'like' button but then i realized this isn't facebook. overhead wires and buildings over 4 stories...these are the things that will end ottawa. ken gray and diane holmes are probably the same person...anyone ever consider this possibility?

[gjhall]

Looks like Ken and Diane have a following in the New York Times...of 1885!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/re...ref=realestate

Personal favourite quote: "No children had grown into mushrooms..." There's one we haven't heard in Ottawa yet!

[Acajack]

Not sure this is an exact fit but just to make you Ottawa guys feel better here is an article showing we also have these types of people in the Outaouais.

Residents in exurban Cantley are upset that a new school will be built on their street. They had gotten used to using the new school's lot as their own personal park and thought it would stay that way forever.

Of course, given the size of the lots in Cantley the school will probably easily be 100 or 200 feet away from the nearest house.

No one has yet had the guts to say "think of the children!", but it could just be a question of time.

Article (en français):

http://www.lapresse.ca/le-droit/actu...-a-cantley.php

[Dr.Z]

Originally Posted by Acajack

No one has yet had the guts to say "think of the children!", but it could just be a question of time.

I've been saying that since day 1!

[Cre47]

Today, he continued on a series of annoying posts about the western LRT corridor. Like 5 or 6 posts today ranting as usual.

Hum and I also I'm wondering what he thinks about the Interprovincial Bridge Study and the NIMBYISM of Manor Park (another hot area for NIMBYISM). Not a lot of posts about that (if any).

[Nepean]

It appears to me that Ken Gray does not read his own newspaper. After David Reevely did an excellent job of explaining why Carling is not the right street for the western extension of LRT, our favourite Bull Dog blogger posted several emails arguing why Carling is the "obvious" choice for such an extension.

I try to be as open minded as possible so I make every effort to take Ken Gray's arguments seriously. I think his open letter to Mayor Watson contained some valid points, and in a previous post to this site I even wrote that Carling should be seriously considered as an alternative route. But I find it inexcusable for a journalist to continue arguing a point while ignoring the fact that a colleague as his own newspaper has clearly explained why this point is problematic.

There is nothing wrong with changing one's mind after reviewing all of the evidence. For instance, in my previous post on Carling, I said that I agreed with Ken Gray's view that Carling should be seriously considered as an LRT extension. After doing further research, however, it has become clear to me why this position is wrong.

I know that Ken Gray views many of his opponents as trolls, but David Reevely is no troll, so why does he completely ignore Reevely's post?

[Cre47]

I literally laugh out loud on the last sentence from this letter just to demonstrate how silly it was.

http://blogs.ottawacitizen.com/2012/...r-has-started/

[S-Man]

It seems like the Citizen is doing a retiree a favour by allowing his increasingly isolated and biased views into their paper/website.

Reevely is a smart guy, probably the smartest at the Citizen (what's the deal with Joanne Chianello?? It's like she's being groomed from behind the scenes!). There are lots of good things on Greater Ottawa, but the Bulldog stifles debate instead of stimulating it. If you disagree with Ken, you're a troll. But he'll publish ridiculous letters from his NIMBY neighbours as proof that the world agrees with him wholeheartedly.

I think many years down the line, after Ottawa has moved out of its growing pains phase, those who were here will remember Gray as the embodiment of the attitude that held the city back.

[Nepean]

Ken Gray's LRT rant advocates a solution for the wrong problem. As Akerman explained in a recent post, the debate over LRT confuses commuter rail with local rail. This is evident in a letter to Mayor Watson that the West Wellington Community Association is preparing. In their letter, the WWCA (who are advocating for Carling as the main western extension) write this:

The four routes selected by the Transportation Committee lead us to believe that the LRT is not really meant to serve residents of Ottawa living between Woodroffe and the downtown. It appears that the purpose of the system is to move suburban commuters quickly through (or around) our communities in order to deliver them to downtown jobs.

To which one can reply: That's right. The LRT is a commuter line akin to Paris' RER train system. It is not meant to replicate the street car system in Toronto. David Reevely makes a similar point in his recent post when he wrote that:

[T]he rail line the planners are contemplating is to get passengers from Nepean and Kanata to and from downtown — not specifically to serve the area in between Lincoln Fields and Tunney’s Pasture. There’ll be stops along the way, of course, but that’s not the overriding goal. Given that particular problem, the planners say, Carling Avenue is the wrong solution. ... It may be that they’ve been given the wrong problem to solve. Maybe there are objections that still need airing on that point. But if the experts are trying to solve the wrong problem, well, that’s a different problem.

What Ken Gray is doing is getting a lot of people angry by presenting a solution to a problem that is not being contemplated. The result is that he is undermining Ottawa's transportation development, while simultaneously creating misunderstanding in the general public. This is why I find his latest string of Bull Dog posts so infuriating.

[rodionx]

... and giving suburban commuters a fast, direct route that encourages them to leave their cars at home does serve the interests of people in the core. We don't have to use it to benefit from it.

Gray et. al.'s opposition is disingenuous, of course. Like Glebe residents expressing deep concern about how the stadium should be located on the Transitway, they really just don't want it built anywhere near their neighbourhood. Issues like that let NIMBYs pretend that they actually care about the good of the city. Gray is Ottawa's leading specialist in this technique.

[kevinbottawa]

I'm confused. Even if this system is being created primarily to get people from the suburbs to downtown more quickly, how would Westboro not benefit from this line? First, they would be directly linked to downtown by rail. They could bypass road traffic if they need to get downtown to work or play. Second, the city would have better access to Westboro, which in my opinion is one of the best places to hangout in this city. Every person I bring to Westboro, whether they're visiting from out of town, have recently moved here, or have lived here a long time but never leave their neck of the woods, loves it. I live in Vanier, but I'm in Westboro and Wellington West at least once per week. Giving the city rail access to Westboro can only benefit businesses in the area. I foresee the day where my kids will want to take the train to Westboro to hang out with their friends. Shoot! I foresee the day when I'll be doing that.

[Dado]

Originally Posted by S-Man

I think many years down the line, after Ottawa has moved out of its growing pains phase, those who were here will remember Gray as the embodiment of the attitude that held the city back.

Gray is far from the only problem, and far from being the newest, either.

City Staff can take plenty of blame because they wasted half a decade trying to maintain the absurd notion that the primary core of the rapid transit network should remain as BRT. As late as 2008 such a notion was still being defended as being "viable" if combined with a downtown bus tunnel. City Staff are the ones who helped created people like Gray in the first place, since he was a big cheerleader of their N-S LRT project. Another project in that plan was a line down Carling Avenue. City Staff played a dangerous game back then: they knew that BRT was not all that popular and they knew LRT was far more popular but they were still so obsessed with BRT that they couldn't let it go. So what they came up with was a plan with BRT as the primary network and LRT as the secondary network (which is pretty much ass-backwards, so the average person would interpret the network exactly opposite to what staff intended it) but they let people think that LRT was going to be more important than it was actually slated to be, hence the idea of a Carling line as primary was sown.

Not only did Ken Gray fall for this claptrap, but so too did David Reevely. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he thought that the N-S LRT was just the first step to getting rid of the buses when in fact the N-S LRT was designed in such a way downtown as to avoid having enough capacity to deal with the buses. Of the Citizen columnists, only Randall Denley realized what was going on.

In the more distant past, we have our old friends Andy Haydon and John Bonsall to thank. They pushed BRT when we should have been looking at LRT, like Calgary and Edmonton did. They got their way and we ended up with heavily commuter-oriented busways that no community in their right mind would want while history has proved that BRT stations do not spur on much development since no one wants to be next to a bus highway. Thus the notion that rapid transit facilities are something to be avoided is firmly implanted in Ottawa. Moreover, in the case right now in the west end, the easy opportunity to build light rail along the old CPR corridor to as far west as Woodroffe has been lost due to subsequent development.

For some reason, the RMOC of the 1970s became the nexus of BRT thought in North America. Bonsall is just the most prominent but a whole raft of former RMOC and private sector transportation engineers who dabbled in BRT planning in the region went on to try to promote BRT elsewhere on the continent and notably in Brisbane, Australia. This BRT lobby held such sway here that they successfully fought off LRT in the 1990s, excepting the O-Train, and in the 2000s they still managed to get a TMP produced that protected their obsession because what they did not want is for their Ottawa case study to switch over to light rail. To some degree, that is still with us in the guise of the so-called "need" to grade separate the future rail system everywhere - just as is the case with BRT. If it could be shown that an at-grade LRT system could easily outperform grade-separated BRT, then a lot of the rationale for infrastructure-heavy BRT systems like the Transitway would evaporate.

So, while Ken Gray may seem a bit of a nuisance, the truth is that what has truly held us back here in Ottawa is the BRT lobby because of what they implemented on the ground, what they prevented and what they did to the perceptions of the population concerning rapid transit.

[S-Man]

Thanks, Dado, that was very informative, and really shows how a narrow-minded view from the 1970s still holds a lot of sway in planning circles today.

My beef of the N-S LRT was the same as eveyone else's - that the system wouldn't handle the volume of passengers needed and would be subject to the same multitude of delay scenarios as buses. It was not the solution the city needed and Chiarelli was an idiot to go for it. A stop-gap solution that would be maxed-out in ten years, with trains in the mean time stuck in traffic jams, behind accidents and struggling through snowstorms.

It would have been the typical Ottawa planning disaster brought on by 'this solution is cheaper' thinking. How anyone could still not see the drawbacks of that plan is beyond me.

Critics like Grey, Lowell Green, Haydon, etc, think transit users are infatuated with the 'idea' of LRT, when in fact they're enamoured by versions of LRT that WORK - ie - get us to places faster, more comfortably, and more reliably.

[J.OT13]

For those who don't know, here is a link to a 2004 "Rapid" Transit "Master" Plan. Note that the "rapid" LRT mostly uses existing railways on the urban fringe and that the central city is only served by one tram line (Carling-Bronson-Rideau/Montreal) and buses. Also note that only the tram and Barrhaven/Riverside South have direct access to downtown. People from Kanata and Orleans would have to transfer on a. buses, b. overcrowded trams or c. take a huge detour to the Barrhaven/Riverside South line (which would have had overcrowded 2 car trains eventualy stuck in downtown traffic).

I cannot figure out how anyone could think this was a good idea, but yet it passed on council and some people still advocate this fatally flawed plan. WTF?


http://www.ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa...06%20final.htm

[Nepean]

Originally Posted by kevinbottawa

I'm confused. Even if this system is being created primarily to get people from the suburbs to downtown more quickly, how would Westboro not benefit from this line? First, they would be directly linked to downtown by rail. They could bypass road traffic if they need to get downtown to work or play. Second, the city would have better access to Westboro, which in my opinion is one of the best places to hangout in this city. Every person I bring to Westboro, whether they're visiting from out of town, have recently moved here, or have lived here a long time but never leave their neck of the woods, loves it. I live in Vanier, but I'm in Westboro and Wellington West at least once per week. Giving the city rail access to Westboro can only benefit businesses in the area. I foresee the day where my kids will want to take the train to Westboro to hang out with their friends. Shoot! I foresee the day when I'll be doing that.

Kevin, the closest analogy I can think of is the number 95 bus. By going through the Transitway it benefits residents in Westboro, Wellington West and Hintonburg. However, it's primary purpose is not to serve these communities but to get commuters from Bells Corner / Baseline to downtown.

The current debate over LRT is akin to a conversation about how to replace the 95 bus. To extend this analogy, Ken Gray's argument is like saying that the 95 bus route should be replaced by a local bus that makes numerous stops down Carling. For current users of the 95 such as myself this is utter madness.

If Ken wants to argue that Ottawa should forget the suburbs and concentrate instead on improving public transit between Westboro and Downtown then that is one thing. In fact, I think this argument can be defended, and I say this as someone who lives in the suburbs. However, that is not what he is doing. His main argument is that Carling is the ideal solution for suburbanites, which is simply not true.

[Luker]

Great post Dado, thanks for the insight. Surely is more evident why the city has avoided east-west corridor (highly populated, natural vernacular growth) BRT to LRT conversion and pushed for south extension all these years.

And that 2004 master plan is just terrible J.OT13

[McC]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

People from Kanata and Orleans would have to transfer on a. buses, b. overcrowded trams or c. take a huge detour to the Barrhaven/Riverside South line

They would have still had the 90s and Express buses on the Transitway for direct-to-downtown service (blue lines on that Master Plan Map). Those buses would have just had the fun of competing with the two tram lines (and everyone else) for for space in the corridor between Bayview and MacKenzie-King.

[McC]

Originally Posted by Nepean

...The LRT is a commuter line akin to Paris' RER train system...

not sure where you're coming from with the RER analogy. The RER is the "Réseau Express Régional". GO, AMT's Train de Banlieu and Vancouver's West Coast Express are the closest examples we have to the RER: heavy rail commuter trains that run largely on existing rail corridors to connect stations within far flung suburbs to a very limited number of stations in the core of the city. The difference with the Canadian ones is that most don't provide the all day frequent service using electric trains that the RER uses to complement (and relieve congestion on) the Paris Metro.

RER trains are NOT LRVs, they're big, heavy, high-capacity trains (e.g., double-deckers on the RER-AD). The trains run on lots of track, many stations are at least triple tracked so express trains can bypass them, and there are lots of branches on the lines as they cover a huge network. The trains usually only stop at one station central to each suburb/town, and stop at a very limited number of stations in the Paris core, either for correspondence to Metro lines, or to serve an area without a nearby metro line (e.g., Luxembourg on the RER-B, the newest RER, the E has been planned to similarly augment the metro, but that line's expansion has been slow to progress)

If we were building something on the RER model, we would be buying dozens more O-Train type vehicles (with the intention to eventually convert to electric, like GO and AMT plan to do, for more efficient service), and we'd be running them as often as possible, on all of the existing tracks in the region, as far as possible east and west as well as south (presumably double/triple tracking stations to reduce headways). Downtown, we'd have a short tunnel to link Bayview to Union station, with at most one stop in between. That would be it. Also, if we were doing like France, we'd probably be converting the Transitway to a driverless metro (Siemans Neo-VAL would be a leading technology choice, I bet -- see the planned Ligne-B in Rennes, pop ~250K), and of course, we'd be adding more stations and building above the line wherever possible on top of all that, we'd probably be digging metro lines under Bank and Rideau-Montreal, as well as building tram lines to link the suburbs to each other, complete with nice happy new town squares all along those lines.

What we're planning is a strange camel-type creature, taking LRT/Tram hardware, using it to serve subway/metro capacity in the core, with the intention of running it more like a commuter line for the short branches outside of the core (i.e., avoiding development areas and stopping as little as possible to provide as fast service as we can to far flung suburbs, but suburbs which we won't actually be running trains anywhere near for decades, if ever). It's not commuter rail because it doesn't go anywhere near commuting suburbs, or use heavy commuter trains. But it's not LRT either, since it's turning it's back on development areas, running long trains, and skipping along too long between stops in the already-intensifying areas. And it's not a metro, because we want to have drivers, we don't want to run under the densest parts of town, hit big secondary destinations, and we don't want people to use it for local connections from one urban neighbourhood to another.

whew, that got long.

[McC]

Ken Gray's "publishing his inbox" business model reminds me of an old Globe and Mail ad campaign that went something like: "everyone has an opinion, but is it informed?"