Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
What do you think would have been the outcome if they built a Seattle-style bus tunnel downtown rather than converting to LRT? They're a similar length and Seattle operated theirs with just buses for 15 year before doing an LRT conversion.
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I had the nerve to suggest that a bus tunnel was probably the cheapest way to solve the downtown congestion problem on the Ottawa board, probably around $1B. You can imagine the ridicule I got with my screen name. When we decided to build an LRT tunnel, it became inevitable that the Transitways had to be converted at a cost of $5B+ and if we want to reach Kanata and Barrhaven, we just keep on adding to that. In addition, Ottawa has been suffering from over a decade of transit disruption on its most critical route.
A bus tunnel would have bought us 20 years and post-pandemic, probably 50 years. There would have been minimal disruption during construction. There was a problem. Instead of focusing on moving people, it also became an urbanist project, that required the removal of all OC buses off of Albert and Slater Streets, with the idea of making them urban paradises. We would have ample capacity for years, by using both a tunnel route and a surface route. But a bus tunnel alone would be at capacity, so that option was automatically eliminated. Total bus removal on the surface became a necessary project requirement. We were going to have a multitude of outdoor cafes all along Albert and Slater. Unfortunately, the buildings are not designed for street facing retail and restaurants and both streets are urban canyons, shaded most of the day. This was never going to happen and it hasn't happened in 5 years since the removal of the bus jam.
A bus tunnel would have freed up a lot of money to make other transit improvements, that would have grown ridership, whether new rail lines or busways. All these other projects have now been indefinitely postponed or simply deleted from the Transportation Master Plan.
What I cannot fathom, is proceeding with projects that were not going to move people faster. Is that not the point of rapid transit investment? And many of the problems that we are seeing were predictable, but why did our decision makers not see it? Part of it, is that they don't use transit, and also, they did not see the limitations of rail in comparison to grade separated BRT. Rail could give you capacity but not faster service. As it turns out, rail offers slower service especially where the old bus jam did not exist. But shiny new trains were irresistible to our politicians and the general public, until they did not meet expectations.
Can you imagine building the Eglinton Crosstown, or the Hurontario LRT or Montreal's REM without some expectations that passengers would be moved faster?