About a kilometre down the road from the new Moodie LRT station, public servants at the Department of National Defence battle each morning for a spot in the Carling Campus’s overflowing parking lots.
The space crunch stretches back years, but tensions reached a boiling point this spring when military police towed 13 improperly parked cars belonging to government workers.
With most rank-and-file federal public servants required back in-office four days a week as of July 6, DND is looking for solutions.
Area councillor Theresa Kavanagh hopes the city and the department have found an answer: a badly needed sidewalk stretching from the nearby LRT station right up to the campus gate.
“When we built the Moodie station, we had to finish the job,” Kavanagh said.
“If you’re going to have a major transit station and thousands of employees going there, you need a sidewalk — and it’s got to be a good one.”
The proposed sidewalk and expanded bus service at the sprawling DND facility are among the big-ticket items on a list of 48 “transportation, mobility, and operational enhancements” detailed in a city report headed to council on Wednesday, July 15.
The report breaks down the city’s plan to handle an anticipated influx of transit riders this fall and beyond — with staff expecting 65,000 additional trips each week, driven mostly by the federal government’s latest return-to-office policy.
All told, measures in the plan will cost around $30 million, with the city looking to recoup much of the expense from the feds.
In the case of the Moodie Drive sidewalk, the project will only go ahead with federal support.
“It’s all about the funding,” Kavanagh said. “Since (DND) themselves have expressed desire for this, we expect that they’ll come through.”
Because the project responds directly to a request from the department, Kavanagh said she expected the city to ask for a “hefty chunk” of the $3.92 million required to build the sidewalk and expand bus service to the campus from Tunney’s Pasture and Kanata.
Exactly how much of the total, she didn’t know.
“As much as we can get, I guess,” she said.
At $20.1 million, the costliest item in the report would accelerate the expansion of the Bowesville LRT park-and-ride by adding between 800 and 1,000 new spots, effectively doubling its capacity.
The city plans to fund the expansion through development charges and transit supported debt, though it’s seeking to offset about half the cost through a joint federal-provincial program.
The park-and-ride, located south of the Ottawa airport along O-Train Line 2, saw peak usage last September of nearly 90 per cent, according to area councillor Steve Desroches.
“In the suburban communities, these park-and-rides are extremely popular,” said Desroches, who praised various other measures in the city’s transit plan, which includes longer-term projects like the park-and-ride alongside more immediate actions like expanded bus service.
“We’re putting mobility on a war footing for the City of Ottawa,” he said.
City staff are also seeking council endorsement for $2.68 million to support a range of traffic interventions, including new cameras, more transit ambassadors at big stations, dedicated pick-up and drop-off locations downtown, new measures to limit or defer road encroachment applications and a paid advertising campaign to share travel tips.
Another $2 million is specifically earmarked to “support federal employees spending more days in office,” which the city expects to fund through parking revenues, existing budgets and a boost in ridership.
Those measures include:
- $240,000 to cover overtime for maintenance workers.
- $300,000 to continue express bus service between Blair Station and downtown.
- $1.1 million to establish additional express bus routes and support additional service on existing routes from park-and-rides and other key locations, such as Barrhaven Centre, Place d’Orléans, Kanata and South Keys.
- $25,000 to extend peak no-parking and no-stopping restrictions by half an hour on select streets downtown.
- $294,000 to support rapid response for road incidents in August and September.
Additional trips on the 74, 75, 61, 62 and 63 bus routes will be extended to connect directly to Gatineau, and service on O-Train Line 1 will be more frequent this fall, with two-car trains running every four minutes (down from five) during peak periods.
Staff are also seeking to increase fines for no-stopping and no-parking violations and to allow rec centres and places of worship to “offer or lease surplus parking spaces to the general public,” if they’re located close to rapid transit in the downtown core.
The goal is to implement all measures by September 1 and keep them in effect until March 31, 2027.
Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper, who is running for mayor in this fall’s municipal election, said the plan amounted to “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
“The clearest answer would be don’t send those workers back to work nearly as many days,” he said. “I don’t know that there is an ideal plan for trying to mitigate the kind of congestion that we can anticipate.”
Leiper, who vocally opposed the city’s own return-to-office mandate, said the federal government’s decision to crack down on hybrid work will come at a steep cost for Ottawa taxpayers.
“It’s a reckless decision,” he said. “They’ve externalized a lot of the costs of the return-to-office to the Ottawa taxpayer and to the Ottawa commuter.”
Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, who is seeking re-election this fall, praised the city’s plan in a post on social media, calling it “comprehensive.”
Laura Shantz, board member for the advocacy group Ottawa Transit Riders, called the plan a “good start,” but said she has questions about how the city will ensure it has enough vehicles to meet the increased demand.
As the city renews its bus fleet, it’s often replacing articulated buses and double-deckers with lower-capacity electric buses, she said.
“I like seeing increased frequencies — I love that,” Shantz said. “But I also want to make sure that if we count the number of spots on the bus that that is still a number that’s not going to leave people on the side of the road.”
Shantz said the city had “no choice” but to address access to DND’s Carling Campus, but she found the Bowesville park-and-ride expansion to be “a bit of a head scratcher.”
“We already see struggles to meet capacity on high routes where we have high transit ridership,” she said.
“Maybe it’s good for long-term planning, but I don’t know if you’re going to see an immediate payoff.”
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