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Originally Posted by Mille Sabords
Not so. The existing Greyhound terminal IS downtown. It is conveniently close to the highway for buses, yes, but it is conveniently walkable from Bank Street (a block and steps) and it is part of a fabric of streets and blocks that naturally takes you into the city on foot. Maybe at the time it was put there, everyone might not have seen it as "purely downtown", but today I'd venture to say only a slim minority of people would not describe this location as downtown.
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The Wikipedia entry on
Downtown Ottawa disagrees with you:
[Downtown Ottawa] is bordered by the Ottawa River to the north, the Rideau Canal to the east, Gloucester Street to the south and Bronson Avenue to the west. This area and the residential neighbourhood to the south are also known locally as 'Centretown'.
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That's about as stunning a rationale as I've ever seen. It's like, "oh well, we screwed up once, why don't we just screw up all the way and to hell with people and their wish for convenience." There is NO benefit in mixing the passenger rail and coach operations. They compete with one another, they basically serve the same corridors, and nobody transfers from one to the other. Nobody. There is no reason to combine the two.
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Of course no one transfers between the two - it's inconvenient to do so. Take a hypothetical trip from Carleton Place to Montreal. Today, that requires a transfer in Ottawa (i.e. coaches don't go from Carleton Place to Montreal). Given the separation of the coach and train stations, few would opt to transfer from coach to train, but put them together and some may well do so. Or from Rockland to Toronto, which again requires a transfer in Ottawa. Some people would take a train one way and a coach the other, especially if it is a multi-leg trip. These are the kind of things that can start to develop because putting them together increases the number of options available to people to choose from. It's agglomeration economics.
As for your contention that there is no benefit in combining them in one place, that's patently absurd. If absolutely nothing else, and ignoring the above paragraph, it would benefit taxi operators by decreasing the variability of rides. A smaller number of operators could serve everyone just as easily, freeing up taxi capacity for use elsewhere.
An increased volume of ridership at one place would also increase the market potential for related services, like restaurants and hotels, through economies of scale.
We already have commuter coaches operating into the city, and it's likely that in a few years we'll have the first commuter trains doing the same. Future operations to the east will use both and will be operated or at least organized by the same company (i.e. the peak run or two will be by train, the others - early, late, during the day - by coach). With the downtown Transitway being wound down after the tunnel is built, it is to be expected that coaches will no longer head downtown either, so they'll need a place to terminate where they can tie into the transit system (and don't forget that the operators would want to operate coaches and trains out of the same place for the convenience of their customers). Today, we have tour buses occupying space at the train station turnaround who could be using a co-located coach terminal instead. Again, there are benefits to combining these operations into one place that is served by transit. Ideally that place would be downtown somewhere but there are costs and obstacles to doing that.
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Wellington-Commissioner-Albert would be slightly more out-of-the-way than Catherine but still sufficiently downtown, but it would still be a sub-standard location.
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A location around the escarpment would be far easier to serve with transit than a location on Catherine, and it is physically closer to everything downtown than Catherine. Plus it's actually possible to route rails to it, so even if you don't buy into the idea of it as a multi-modal hub, it's still better than the current train station location as a standalone site for a train station.
From the rail perspective, it can also be tied into services to/from Quebec, so it would be possible, for example, for the steam train to Wakefield to operate directly out of downtown Ottawa.
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Really, when picking a location for a major intercity transportation facility, the selection process shouldn't be "let's see what's vacant" (or even less, "let's see who'll let us bunk with them". It should be, "where do people need to be upon arrival"?, and then go and get that land and do it there. Or close enough to "there" to be locationally valid.
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I've mentioned DNDHQ before, but the response to that is something like "it'll never happen". Short of having near-dictatorial powers and lots of resources to spend, there's always going to be a trade-off between the ideal and the possible.
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