The future of Ottawa's Transit

[Dado]

My group was led by Colin Simpson.

Shortly before the discussion David Jeanes and he were discussing the West Transitway and the Byron corridor. Mr. Jeanes wants it in the corridor but that would have to be "over Alex Cullen's dead body" since Cllr Cullen is opposed.

At any rate, our discussion group got sidetracked when one guy was first complaining about cost (which I kind of agree with - I can't make the figures make sense so I'd like to see them broken down a bit more) but then he went on to expound his personal vision of PRT (including using sleds on guideways upon which one would park one's own car). The irony of complaining about cost but then advocating PRT didn't occur to him, much to the amusement of all others. He didn't seem to realize that most of his PRTVs would be empty once they got downtown, or that the sled-like ones still required a parking space for the cars. Unfortunately that wasted a lot of time as he was arguing that people won't take transit, be it trains or buses, and then we got into the old Europe-North America argument.

Besides that, the funniest thing was that Colin was basically incapable of presenting the first two options as being worthy of consideration. He just did not believe them himself even though he had been assured by the consultants (you know who!) that it could work, but he was on the verge of laughing when he said it would require "diesel-electric hybrid double-articulated buses running every 15 seconds or so". Several people questionned why the bus tunnel options were even being presented since they were impractical.

Colin had a few other interesting things to say. STO currently sends about 120 buses per peak hour through Ottawa, rising to 220 by 2031 (i.e. that's what OC Transpo already sends through and we see how well that works). I think there's going to have to be a second set of tracks somewhere downtown (or very long trains) to handle those volumes unless there is no increase in our own (which is not what they were predicting last night). He doesn't share the transfer-phobia of the BRT people and said that transfers aren't that much of an issue if they are to a higher order form of transit at decent facilities. He also said that LRT has something like a 17% land value uplift in the vicinity of stations.