O-Train Line 1/3 [Stage 2 | West Extension | Tunney's to Baseline/Moodie] | U/C

[Richard Eade]

‘Integration’ of transit facilities into its surroundings is a difficult concept for the City of Ottawa. Look around at the existing infrastructure and you will see that ‘integration’ for the City means adding a connection between their completely separate facility and something nearby. The Bayshore Station has a bridge to the mall’s parking structure; Billing Bridge has a bridge to the mall; Baseline Station’s tunnel (the future Baseline Station that is) has its own corridor but college building will be on either side. Even the City’s plan for their new downtown LRT tunnel had all of the accesses on the City’s RoW, as pavilions on the sidewalks or on land the City expropriated so that they would have their own entrance.

However, thankfully the City is no longer designing the Confederation Line and the RTG has gone ahead and gained permission to embed the downtown station accesses into neighbouring buildings. This is a big step forward and one that I hope to see repeated for the Stage 2 extensions of the line.

The City will show a Cleary Station separate and apart from anything else – but still use words like “It is integrated into the NCC’s park.” It will talk about the possibilities of integration with a redeveloped mall; however, it will be shown as a stand-alone structure. When the consortium actually doing the design of Stage 2 takes over, we might actually see a renegotiation of what else can be on the property and we might get some actual integration. But we will have to wait for the final product to be announced before we will know.