Ottawa Rapid Transit Network developments

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

All types of transit will encounter problems from time to time. This is not unique to buses. Go Trains will shut down from time to time as has been the case with our O-Train. Portions of subways shut down as well.

How do we minimize these problems? By providing redundency. This is one of my beefs about the tunnel plan. In building the tunnel, we are actually closing our main surface transit access to downtown. So, if anything goes wrong in the tunnel, most of our downtown transit system simply shuts down. Keep those running shoes handy!

Or just have temporary bus stops set up just for that function. You people are talking like Ottawa is the first city in the world to receive rail mass transit.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by d_jeffrey

Or just have temporary bus stops set up just for that function. You people are talking like Ottawa is the first city in the world to receive rail mass transit.

You are right but Ottawa is the only city that is closing down the existing transit access road into downtown. Toronto didn't close Yonge Street when it opened the subway. Montreal didn't close down Ste. Catherine Street when they opened the subway.

[lrt's friend]

As for the comment on it would be wasteful to scrap the Transitway, when your car costs more in repairs than to buy a new one, you scrap it.

How relevant is that comparison? It is not as if the Transitways are falling apart requiring massive repairs.

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

You are right but Ottawa is the only city that is closing down the existing transit access road into downtown. Toronto didn't close Yonge Street when it opened the subway. Montreal didn't close down Ste. Catherine Street when they opened the subway.

But both cities did remove the streetcar lines and provided bus service elsewhere in the meantime. There are other usable routes available fo Ottawa.

Montréal didn't close down Ste Catherine because the metro is under Maisonneuve, and yes, they did close Maisonneuve.

Before the metro's construction, de Maisonneuve Blvd. didn't exist. What we now know as that boulevard was a handful of unconnected roads, including de Montigny St. (everything east of St. Laurent), the last bit of which (the lower red portion in the image at top) has been removed with this redesign.

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

How relevant is that comparison? It is not as if the Transitways are falling apart requiring massive repairs.

In operating costs they are. The city keeps pumping a bucket of money just because it spend so much on the Transitway in the first place. Well, it's time to actually acknowledge that it is a money grabber, and fix it.

[Suzie]

Originally Posted by Dado

Except that's not what happened. That was just speculation on their part which you've just embellished with talk of "overaggressive car drivers". Someone on that page just "guessed" that it was traffic at Nicholas-Waller. But rationally, for it to create the tailback it did all the way back to Lees, this traffic would have to be blocking the buses over the course of several cycles in a row. At 180 buses/hour, there's about three buses arriving per minute - so that queue had to form over many many cycles, not just one or two. There's about 1.5 km to Lees from Waller, and assuming an average bus length of 15 m (12 for standard, 18 for artics), we're looking at about 100 queued buses and upwards of 30 minutes' of queueing.That would have required the intersection to be blocked pretty much all the time with no possibility of getting a bus through, with cross-traffic either never moving and clearing and/or always getting reblocked if it did move. Moreover, a good chunk of the buses (i.e. a few minutes' worth) would be able to get through on one light cycle if the intersection cleared even once every few cycles (the limiting factor being the number of buses "ready to go" at Laurier Station up to Nicholas-Waller). The likelihood of such a thorough grid-locking over such an extended period of time is improbable. So something else had to be the cause, or at least the main cause.

For westbound buses, the green light at Waller/Nicholas does not last as long as for eastbound ones, because of the left turn signal for northbound traffic coming off the Bridge. Further, due to the location of the westbound Transitway route (i.e., at the north end of the intersection), they are more likely to be impacted by northbound or turning traffic that is trying to sneak in. I can easily see a backup of that size building up, especially westbound at peak times, if there is consistent traffic interference.

Had you visited the flickr link you would have seen one more key photograph and you would have seen that a cause other than blockage at Waller had to be the case, but you're seeing the facts you want to see because you've jumped to a conclusion as to the specific cause:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ottawab...n/photostream/

Same day, same bus jam - except it's also on the McKenzie King Bridge west of and therefore beyond McKenzie King Station and the Waller intersection. At a minimum, this bus jam extended to Elgin and likely extended all the way across downtown Ottawa on Albert. This wasn't caused by a problem at Nicholas. If the problem had been at Nicholas, the bridge would have been devoid or virtually devoid of buses in the westbound direction.

So much for your investigation. All I had to do was keep pressing the next picture button at flickr.

Actually, I HAD visited the flickr link and the Mackenzie King Bridge pictures are not inconsistent with eyewitness accounts. When the original blockage would have been overcome, the long backup simply would have migrated farther downstream into the downtown core where would-be passengers would have been accumulating over an extended period time at the height of the afternoon rush hour. One would fully expect that the downtown stations (Metcalfe Station on Albert in particular) and the buses would be overwhelmed, since, for various reasons, they simply do not have the ability to cope with such high volumes in a short amount of time. Hence, pictures of backed-up westbound buses on the Bridge were not surprising to me at all.

Other factors may well have aggravated the situation. For example, I’m not sure if they were still blocking a lane on Albert so that they could do geotechnical testing for the tunnel. The testing occurred at around the same time, but they may well have moved on by then to a less sensitive location. Elgin (northbound) may be have been congested as well since there is a lot of construction activity downstream. Similarly, problems on Wellington Street can impact the flow on north-south streets downtown.

Which makes the rest of your post below speculative rubbish.

You are right, Dado. When I take the bus at rush hour or I walk around downtown during that time period and see the problems I keep bringing up, I must be hallucinating. It must be the diesel fumes.

As for the flexibility of buses, it thankfully came in handy last weekend (I can’t remember whether it was Saturday or Sunday morning). There was a nasty car crash on Slater. Hence, the section between Bronson and Bay was closed by the police, and eastbound buses had to be rerouted using Bronson, Laurier and Bay. It added a couple of minutes to my trip, but otherwise it was fine. A surface LRT line on Slater, on the other hand, would have been brought to a full stop. Will the Friends of the O-Train put that on their website? I highly doubt it. But there’s no reason not to, because a lot of O-Train riders use the Transitway to get to/from O-Train stations like Bayview (in fact, a few of them were likely on the very bus I was riding on).

And what about the time the window fell from the hotel onto Albert Street a few years back? A freak and totally unacceptable occurrence to be sure, but it happened. Although it was slow going and they were not given the priority they deserve given the number of people riding in them, the buses were rerouted and were able to move.

[RTWAP]

Originally Posted by d_jeffrey

Nobody is forcing the city to do a temporary Transitway elsewhere, if people don't want to have any traffic on THEIR street, then they can pay the increase in property taxes themselves. Sure it will be a horrible 2-3 years, but city building requires it.

You can build 120m stations if you use other technologies than LRT. 180m LRT stations do not exist anywhere else in the world, period. When you need 180m LRT trains, you build a metro.

International standards for tunnels now include two full entrances, plus elevators. It's not something the city can cheap out on.

Who said anyone is forcing the city?

The city is planning to spend all that money on diverting the transitway traffic onto neighbourhood streets. And they're planning on having the congestion and service reliability issues that will result from it. Nobody is asking them to do it.

I'm not primarily concerned about those neighbourhoods, although they do have valid concerns about the safety, noise, congestion and other impacts. I'm concerned about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the diversion. Money that gets flushed down the drain, or even worse, money that is used to permanently enlarge roads and intersections through older neighbourhoods. The transit plan should be about getting cars off roads, not building more space that will eventually be made available to cars.

Instead, use those hundreds of millions to build a surface rail diversion for the western transitway, and then put the former bus users of that transitway primarily on secondary LRT line while the western transitway is converted.

It's like someone who's building a house and starts with the roof. But since there's no house yet they put up a bunch of structural supports for the roof, and then they build the foundation, and then the walls, at which point the structural supports can be safely removed. It's moronic. If all of the elements are in the plan, then build them in the order that saves money and has the least negative impact on riders, ridership, neighbourhoods, and the environment. And it would cost less at the end of the day.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by RTWAP

Who said anyone is forcing the city?

The city is planning to spend all that money on diverting the transitway traffic onto neighbourhood streets. And they're planning on having the congestion and service reliability issues that will result from it. Nobody is asking them to do it.

I'm not primarily concerned about those neighbourhoods, although they do have valid concerns about the safety, noise, congestion and other impacts. I'm concerned about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the diversion. Money that gets flushed down the drain, or even worse, money that is used to permanently enlarge roads and intersections through older neighbourhoods. The transit plan should be about getting cars off roads, not building more space that will eventually be made available to cars.

Instead, use those hundreds of millions to build a surface rail diversion for the western transitway, and then put the former bus users of that transitway primarily on secondary LRT line while the western transitway is converted.

It's like someone who's building a house and starts with the roof. But since there's no house yet they put up a bunch of structural supports for the roof, and then they build the foundation, and then the walls, at which point the structural supports can be safely removed. It's moronic. If all of the elements are in the plan, then build them in the order that saves money and has the least negative impact on riders, ridership, neighbourhoods, and the environment. And it would cost less at the end of the day.

A better analogy would be a family renovating their house. Instead of renovating the house in a manner that left it liveable, the place was torn apart for 3 years. As a result, an additional $50,000 was spent to build a temporary house next door, which will be torn down when the house renovation was finished. That $50,000 could have been better spent on that new cottage that the family always wanted.

When you talk about Carling route, in the east end, it was planned to build LRT on the Innes and South Orleans transit corridor. This was part of the Chiarelli plan. I didn't like all aspects of that plan because light rail was not to run through the hospital complex. I see a Hospital-Innes route serving a similar purpose as the Carling route in the west end as you suggested. In addition, the Hospital-Innes route is clearly extendable to south Orleans, which is where most of Orleans new growth will take place and also offers future employment land. What better way to attract employment to Orleans than to offer rapid transit to the area where employment land is available? Both a Carling and a Hospital-Innes routes offer intensification opportunities, far better than the Transitway routes. Both will significantly improve transit over current bus service. Both will attract new transit ridership, now and even more so in the future.

I cannot for the life of me understand why we continue to want to build Transitways with the clear intension of converting them to LRT in the future. The enormous disruption that we are planning for the future is unacceptable.

[waterloowarrior]

Originally Posted by RTWAP

Who said anyone is forcing the city?

The city is planning to spend all that money on diverting the transitway traffic onto neighbourhood streets. And they're planning on having the congestion and service reliability issues that will result from it. Nobody is asking them to do it.

I'm not primarily concerned about those neighbourhoods, although they do have valid concerns about the safety, noise, congestion and other impacts. I'm concerned about spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the diversion. Money that gets flushed down the drain, or even worse, money that is used to permanently enlarge roads and intersections through older neighbourhoods. The transit plan should be about getting cars off roads, not building more space that will eventually be made available to cars.

Instead, use those hundreds of millions to build a surface rail diversion for the western transitway, and then put the former bus users of that transitway primarily on secondary LRT line while the western transitway is converted.

The City is spending $149 million extra to support transit service during construction, which will be spread over those 3-5 years. But the new line will save $100 million per year in operating costs. So why delay the current project (which based on the current timeline won't be ready til 2019) and start this whole new Carling + downtown surface line?

[Richard Eade]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

A better analogy would be a family renovating their house. Instead of renovating the house in a manner that left it liveable, the place was torn apart for 3 years. As a result, an additional $50,000 was spent to build a temporary house next door, which will be torn down when the house renovation was finished. That $50,000 could have been better spent on that new cottage that the family always wanted.

When you talk about Carling route, in the east end, it was planned to build LRT on the Innes and South Orleans transit corridor. This was part of the Chiarelli plan. I didn't like all aspects of that plan because light rail was not to run through the hospital complex. I see a Hospital-Innes route serving a similar purpose as the Carling route in the west end as you suggested. In addition, the Hospital-Innes route is clearly extendable to south Orleans, which is where most of Orleans new growth will take place and also offers future employment land. What better way to attract employment to Orleans than to offer rapid transit to the area where employment land is available? Both a Carling and a Hospital-Innes routes offer intensification opportunities, far better than the Transitway routes. Both will significantly improve transit over current bus service. Both will attract new transit ridership, now and even more so in the future.

I cannot for the life of me understand why we continue to want to build Transitways with the clear intension of converting them to LRT in the future. The enormous disruption that we are planning for the future is unacceptable.

A Hospital-Innes route is going to be difficult since the Browning Corridor (the link between the General Hospital and Innes Road) was released from being a protected transportation corridor. The OMB said the City had to make up its mind by the end of 2009 so the City did a study. That study found that there was more potential ridership and less hassle with a bus route beside the Train Yards retail area. You can refer to the study here http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html

[waterloowarrior]

Display Boards for the Cumberland Transitway Extension-Trim Road to Frank Kenny Road Environmental Assessment.

http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

A Hospital-Innes route is going to be difficult since the Browning Corridor (the link between the General Hospital and Innes Road) was released from being a protected transportation corridor. The OMB said the City had to make up its mind by the end of 2009 so the City did a study. That study found that there was more potential ridership and less hassle with a bus route beside the Train Yards retail area. You can refer to the study here http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html

I have a big problem with what was done with this whole project. It presumes building everything as a Bus Transitway. Why are we building whole new Transitways when we have decided not to let buses into downtown? Of course, why did we make this Transitway presumption for Innes corridor in the first place when the Transportation Master Plan was put together?

You know, I have lots of reasons to disagree with Clive Doucet, but on our Transportation Master Plan, I agree. It is more a bus plan than a rail plan.

Here we have a corridor that provides ample room for LRT for almost its entire length, so we choose buses instead. For the Browning corridor, why don't we bury those few short blocks? Surely, it can't be more than the mint that we are prepared to pay at Baseline Station.

The hospital spur also skips the whole east half the hospital complex. As if nobody works or visits at the Perley and Rideau Veterans Home.

To me, this whole study was based on justifying avoiding the Browning corridor to appease Peter Hume and a handful of residents. We presumed buses, so a surface route was needed. We cannot have buses running adjacent to Browing so we have to drop it entirely. One stupid decision leads another stupid decision. We would rather run a Transitway by a big box mall and a rail maintenance yard than providing through service to our city's largest health care complex. Nobody considers the ridership that direct through service from Orleans to the hospital complex would generate, it seems. Nobody recognizes that people hate to transfer and how that affects ridership.

This city council and the decision makers have no backbone to do the right thing. They also want to create a transit system that makes you transfer and transfer again. Why build spurs when you can provide a through route? Why not provide better direct connections to the hospital complex?

When you look at other cities, where do they locate LRT routes? Inevitably, they connect colleges, universities and hospitals. Why? Because they are major public facilities and they generate transit ridership over a wide period of the day. How often do cities build short rapid transit spurs that only connect to an adjacent station? Not very often, if ever!

This is an example of why I can't stand the transportation master plan that we have created since 2006. I would be very happy if they trashed the whole thing and get the politicians out of the process.

[Franky]

There won't even be a route by the shopping centre and office towers, they buggered that up too. The most likely route is from Millenium up Baseline to the Baseline transfer station.

[Dado]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

This is an example of why I can't stand the transportation master plan that we have created since 2006. I would be very happy if they trashed the whole thing and get the politicians out of the process.

But politicians aren't the only problem; indeed there's precious little that they've actually done. Peter Hume is really the only one who has "achieved" anything.

Most of the entire TMP update process was driven by groups other than politicians. Think back to the farce of the four options. Two were unviable bus tunnels. The only distinguishing feature of the other two was whether to convert the O-Train or not. The politicians didn't come up with this. There was no discussion or debate on how far out light rail should extend (i.e. why not Bayshore?); extensions got inserted later but based on density targets in the suburban town centres rather than on more usual measures of ridership per hour or per km of track. That was itself the response of what might be politely termed the rail containment forces to a politician intervention to make extension to the suburbs a long term goal - it's been safely pushed to beyond 2031 in the current TMP. Conversion of the Southeast Transitway was verboten, even though it would solve a load balancing issue downtown. Ceasing to follow the build-a-busway-and-convert-it-later-to-light-rail paradigm wasn't an option, so we're going to get new busways to Cumberland and the like. The use of rail corridors was deleted from the previous TMP. No thought has been accorded in the TMP to the growing interest outside the city for commuter rail and how that's going to tie into the plan - chances are that a commuter rail service will be in operation before the tunnel is even built.

All along the politicians have basically just followed the advice of their staff and their consultants.

[Richard Eade]

Well, I agree that the Councilors are not getting very good information from the Staff, but is this not a circumstance brought on by years of giving Staff no direction and simply accepting the garbage they provide? A child who is not brought up with any rules and supervision will grow up making up their own rules; think of "The Lord of the Flies". Yes, the Staff is running amok, but is it their fault? With no plan to follow, Staff members come up with their own ideas in isolation: One group decides to build a Transitway in what they believe to be an empty transportation corridor; while another group decides to use the space for a garage. Each of these groups should have brought the ideas up to Council at the early idea stage. The Council would have recognized that both groups were talking about using the same area. Since there is no Council keeping track of a big picture, there is no-one making the connections.

Councilors REALLY need to demand that Staff answer questions directly and impartially. If the Councilors don't understand what is presented, they need to delay the decision and learn about the subject through questions and research. The Councilors are only on a few specific committees so that they can concentrate on those topics, but they still need to ensure they understand what they are voting on.

[lrt's friend]

This all sort of suggests that neither staff nor City Council together really know what they are doing. It doesn't matter who is at fault. Perhaps, we don't have the expertise in order to upgrade our rapid transit system properly. What is the role of the consultants? Sometimes I get the impression that they are there to justify decisions made by staff and/or council, rather than provide some real critical advice on what we should be doing to reach our desired transit goals. It seems to me that we got outside advice from a variety of experts (the Mayor's task force) and then we threw it in the garbage. We are content with building a downtown tunnel regardless of whether any of the rest of the network really makes sense or is good value for money.

It has been like, OK, we have but one priority. Fix downtown and build the tunnel. What is the minimum we can tack onto it, to have something that works? So we end up with a tunnel and decide to close down the Transitways for years because that is the cheapest way to go. It doesn't matter what it really achieves beyond the downtown congestion issue nor does it matter how disruptive this is all going to be. On top of that, we clearly decide in doing Transitway conversion that we going to switch from busways to LRT but then we decide to build new busways. It just doesn't make sense.

[Richard Eade]

That's the problem with having no over-all, big picture plan that links everything together. Take the Baseline Station and associated tunnel: Leaving the north end of the tunnel, the trains will be in the middle and the buses will be in the outside lanes. When I asked why this configuration was chosen, I was told that there were no guiding instructions from other links in the system; that is, nothing had been decided farther north so they made a guess. If the buses were going to use the existing Local Platforms at Lincoln Fields, and the train to use the Transitway Platforms, then it would be better for the buses to be on the east of the train. If the buses had to go west before reaching Lincoln Fields, then the buses would be better on the west – maybe. If the Roman Ave corridor is used, then there is a new circular ramp on the east and a new bridge over the 417 for the north/west-bound buses, so having the trains in the middle would be better. This was the scenario which was ultimately adopted for the tunnel design and will likely result in fly-overs being needed in the future.

The Community Design Plan for the Fernbank area wants the busway in the center of the future N-S Arterial; however, the busway is on the east side of the arterial in the planned Transitway extension to Scotiabank Place. The Western Transitway Connections study is dealing with this incompatibility now.

The DOTT needs to be deeper because of a routing and station locations which where chosen before sufficient information had been gathered to determine where they should be.

Conversion of the S-E Transitway to rail instead of ‘upgrading’ the O-Train corridor isn’t even being looked at because the plans for the O-Train line had previously been done.

Without a grand scheme, we wind up with a Platypus. (Maybe that is what we can call the new LRT system?) The bill might be great for some conditions, but does it suit what we need. A broad tail; again, is it what we need? Each group within the City is coming up with what they thing is a great idea for solving one, isolated problem. It might be a nice idea to bundle the transportation into a single corridor, with the trains in the center and the cars on the outsides, but if it doesn’t match other previously design sections, is it really the best solution? Or does it matter that it now adds millions of dollars to the intervening portion for a fly-over? The transition section isn’t part of the cost for the first project, so why worry about it now? Later, it will be essential to solve the problem of the missing link so the taxpayers will pay anything.

Staff does not appear to do over-all planning and concentrate on small contract-able solutions for individual cases. If, in the future, these ‘planlets’ are found to be incompatible with everything else around them, the idea is not re-thought; instead, kludges are added to ‘shoe-horn’ the existing plan into place. I think the last real city-wide transit infrastructure planning occurred back in the 1970s for the original Transitway. I might not agree with every aspect of the Transitway, but at least it was a regional plan with a long-term view; something that we have been missing from Staff recently.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

That's the problem with having no over-all, big picture plan that links everything together...

I'm only aware of two cases where a grand transit scheme actually worked. One was the RER in Paris and the other was the Washington Metro (I'm sure there are other examples, but they are very rare.) In both cases there were national governments willing to come in and spend enormous amounts of money to quickly build a system from scratch. That simply won't happen in Ottawa. A "comprehensive" mass transit system (i.e. one that brings mass transit close to most people in the city) would run in the $10+ billion range (and who knows how much in operating costs). So any council to adopt such a scheme would either be bankrupting the city or planning phases so far in the future as not to be practical.

The fact remains that Ottawa is a very low density city, with a small number of people who live in a high-density urban setting, a slightly larger number who live in mid density areas, a vast majority living in low density sprawl (with the OMB determined to increase more sprawl) and a lot of vacant space in between. The density simply isn't there to make mass transit viable in much of the city.

The current plan has faults, but overall it isn't bad. It deals with the congestion in the central part of the transitway as a first step, has plans to bring light rail to mid-density suburbs in future phases and improves BRT in the low density suburbs until such a time as a higher capacity system is more viable.

[Richard Eade]

You talk as if a plan is done once and then that is it. That is one of the big problems here. Let’s take the N-S LRT plan; it was a long range plan for a limited part of the city that was created in isolation from everything else that needed to be incorporated. Unfortunately, when a larger view was established, things had changed but there was no re-evaluation based on changes in the big picture. The TMP was to look at a system for the entire city, but the old N-S plan was simply slid in because it was already done. The big picture changes and the plan must always be refined. There will always be need to extend the plan as parts are completed, or move in new directions as conditions change. When only a N-S route was being done, and it was to be rail, and it was viewed that it should be along the existing rail line, then the N-S LRT plan might have made sense. However, once the scope was widened to convert the Transitway to rail, then the plan should have been re-evaluated to see if , say, converting the S-E Transitway to rail would have made a better system.

There are lots of things that change and a lot of them might not be within the City’s control; for example, the Province has decided to review its plans for the Eagleson Road Bridge over the 417. In this instance, there should be a review of the Western Transitway’s extension to see if a fly-over could be incorporated in the new structure to move the Transitway to the south of the 417, where the Park & Ride is located. But this can’t be done in the City’s usual manner of asking a Contractor is the section from Moodie to Eagleson should be south of the 417 because that is disconnected from the other portions of the system. Maybe it would be better to cross the 417 at Bayshore to simplify the future BRT link to Baseline Road. A branch could go south while the main Transitway goes west, avoiding the problems with the Crystal Beach community and going directly to the Park & Ride.

Currently the City says it has a Master Plan, but it doesn’t; it has a series of vague, but related ideas which might or might not be joined or implemented. And this goes a lot farther than just for transportation; it should cover ALL of what the City does. For example, the City is spending $7M upgrading the Booth Street Sewer Regulator; has that digging been integrated with the possible combined sewage overflow tank; or the foundation for the new Booth Street Bridge; or laying the infrastructure to help develop that area in the future?

When I refer to an over-all, integrated grand scheme, or plan, I am not looking at a Greber report which takes a city and creates a one-time static plan. I am talking about the realization that a city is a system with many inter-related parts. Just planning a short 2 Km length of rail line is not planning in a cohesive manner. A plan must be able to take a much bigger picture and incorporate many facets. Then, when something changes, all of those connections must be revisited to determine if the plan is still valid or whether it need revision and how, in the context of everything surrounding it.

From my point of view, planning a transit system is a lot more than finding a line on a map by which the City can move 15,000 people per hour per direction from the suburbs to the downtown core. For me, it involves looking at the other opportunities of the entire system of the city. There has been a lot of design work done for the Nicholas Gateway (the area of Lees Avenue and Robinson Park) but when the conversion to rail was decreed for the Transitway, there were no elements to incorporate things from the design charet; why not? The train is being build up on a berm across Hurdman, splitting it into two sections; is there no better way; one that leaves the area in a more developable state? I could go on and on, but I am hoping that I have made my point clearer.

Big picture planning is being able to see that one thing influences many others and that they in turn influence the one. It is not a static thing, continually evolving with no part in isolation from the others.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by acottawa

I'm only aware of two cases where a grand transit scheme actually worked. One was the RER in Paris and the other was the Washington Metro (I'm sure there are other examples, but they are very rare.) In both cases there were national governments willing to come in and spend enormous amounts of money to quickly build a system from scratch. That simply won't happen in Ottawa. A "comprehensive" mass transit system (i.e. one that brings mass transit close to most people in the city) would run in the $10+ billion range (and who knows how much in operating costs). So any council to adopt such a scheme would either be bankrupting the city or planning phases so far in the future as not to be practical.

The fact remains that Ottawa is a very low density city, with a small number of people who live in a high-density urban setting, a slightly larger number who live in mid density areas, a vast majority living in low density sprawl (with the OMB determined to increase more sprawl) and a lot of vacant space in between. The density simply isn't there to make mass transit viable in much of the city.

The current plan has faults, but overall it isn't bad. It deals with the congestion in the central part of the transitway as a first step, has plans to bring light rail to mid-density suburbs in future phases and improves BRT in the low density suburbs until such a time as a higher capacity system is more viable.

In my opinion, we are simply not being creative in order to make the most of the money that will be available to deliver rapid transit to as many people as possible.

We are determined to get as many buses out of downtown as soon as possible in Phase 1 and that has a price tag. We forget that eliminating just 25% of the buses in Phase 1 will eliminate the congestion problem for a long time.

We are determined to convert the Transitways because we believe the trains have to carry most of the passengers from Day 1. This has a price tag.

It doesn't seem to matter that in some cases buses will offer the best solution. In other cases, it may be LRT. In other cases again, it may be DMUs like used for the O-Train. What delivers the quality of service for the least amount of money? Do we really ask that question? A second question. What delivers the most 'new' transit riders? We seem to ignore that one.

I don't buy the argument about density. I believe that catchment population is more important. I also believe that modern suburbs are more dense than most post-war suburbs. So, a lot of Ottawa inside the Greenbelt will be less dense than Orleans or Kanata or Barrhaven especially with all the green corridors that we inherited from the Greber plan.

We all know that Calgary is a low density city yet they have very successfully built LRT and increasingly it is being run to the edge of the suburbs. Why can they do this very successfully and we cannot? Ottawa has a tradition of higher per capita transit ridership than Calgary yet we choose to be timid.

We seem to not know what we want. That's why our transportation plan calls us to build half a corridor as rail and half as a busway. Then we choose to do that for every rapid transit corridor. We have to treat everybody the same. It is a gutless compromise.

I look at what other cities are doing. They choose the best technology for each corridor based on cost and the nature of the corridor. In Denver, they have chosen certain routes to be busways, others to be LRT and others again to be DMUs. The same is being done in Salt Lake City. All go directly downtown. You don't get this half and half business pretty well anywhere and where it has happened, it is usually problematic and people curse it. For example, the Scarborough RT, which should have been built as a subway extension.

We can go on and on about the problem the Greenbelt creates but other cities seem to manage to connect neighbouring cities without continuous density such as the Denver to Boulder connections that are currently being developed or soon will be.

All that is needed is some creativity and desire to accomplish it. Ottawa has become defeatist in achieving meaningful transit objectives as part of its plan. We have created a whole bunch of silly criteria designed to prevent us from being bold.

[Richard Eade]

As for when the current plan should have extended rail to the suburbs; I think you should be looking at the number of people riding the transit system, not the number of people living around it.

Why should there ever be train stations at Iris, the Queensway, Train, or Cyrville? These stations certainly don’t generate as much ridership change as Fallowfield Stations does. And what is the influx count of passengers at Baseline Station going north in the morning? I expect that most of the people going north from Baseline were on the same buses south of Baseline.

Think of it this way; if there were a straight line of green-field between Baseline and Fallowfield Stations, with no obstacles, and suitable for laying a train track, would it have made sense to extend the tracks to Fallowfield? If there is to be such a savings by replacing buses with the train on 22Km (Blair to Baseline), surely replacing hundreds more buses a day between Baseline and Fallowfield would soon save enough to pay for the extra track?

For fun let’s say it costs $50M per Km for twin rail lines through green-fields (although the City’s estimate was less than half that for the line to RS, 10Km for $173M) so to go the roughly 6 Kilometres from Baseline to Fallowfield would be about $300M. If the savings from not running every bus twelve Kilometres across the Greenbelt and back just to dump off their Barrhaven passengers was $20M per year, then it would take 15 years for pay-back. Is this a reasonable return?

As well, the Baseline Station could have been designed much differently, perhaps saving a considerable amount of money. Also, because the buses are traveling a much shorter distance, then many fewer buses are required, further saving money. And, finally, since the distance on the train would be significant, there would be no reason to duplicate the rail and bus lines between Baseline and Lincoln Fields Stations, reducing both the capital and operating costs.

Of course, these numbers were pulled out of a hat, and there is not a direct path from Baseline to Fallowfield because there is a 500 metre obstacle containing houses; but if it were so, would rail to Barrhaven be justified? If it took an extra 10 years to pay back, would it be justified then? Wouldn’t it have helped to have had proper planning to reserve the transportation corridor before those houses were built?

Absolutely, the suburbs tend to be low density, but it just might be that using local buses as concentrators to a single spot can overcome that problem. Indeed, that is exactly what the transit planners intend to do. However, the point at which they are concentrating the crowds is at Baseline and not at Fallowfield; meaning that those ‘local’ concentrator buses need to travel an extra twelve Kilometres across the Greenbelt and back.

Is it also possible that if Barrhaven had a train running all the way to it that there would be an incentive for more businesses to locate there? Maybe more of the RCMP personnel would travel by train and shuttle bus to work.