OC Transpo

[DarthVader_1961]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Most would agréé with you. Artics were brought in the 80s to reduce frequency on the busiest routes. DDs were brought in 10 or so years ago to reduce frequency on commuter routes. Over the years, frequency has been cut in half on many routes with the obvious impact on ridership. Who wants to get to a transfer station and wait 28 minutes at rush hour?

The obvious solutions won't work after damaging the network to the dégrée that we have. We have chased away too many people who won't return after too many bad expériences.

The city has all kinds of excuses. Not enough budget. Not enough buses. Not enough drivers. Not enough mechanics. All designed to get the public to shut up about lousy service.

As a results, we don't even get a modest proposal to improve service on a few key routes that will improve the overall network. Rail alone is not enough..

What about a 10 minutes guarantee on Bank, Montréal, Carling, Baseline, Richmond to start?

10 minutes on Bank would be nice but on street parking would have to be eliminate completely. Not going to happen sadly..

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

If service was built entirely around 40 ft buses, the response to higher demand would be higher frequencies. Imagine that world.

In that world, you also have to will a lot more bus drivers and bus-driver pay and benefits into existence.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

In that world, you also have to will a lot more bus drivers and bus-driver pay and benefits into existence.

Obviously. And if we don't want to do that, the people of this city can enjoy high traffic.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Obviously. And if we don't want to do that, the people of this city can enjoy high traffic.

We can split the difference and continue to use high-capacity buses, actually.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Obviously. And if we don't want to do that, the people of this city can enjoy high traffic.

We could double bus frequency and maybe 1-2% more people who are driving take the bus. I doubt even that. Let's not pretend that's our real choice.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

We can split the difference and continue to use high-capacity buses, actually.

We won't split the difference though. The standing practice is to buy a larger proportion of high capacity buses and keep the schedule as minimal as possible.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

We could double bus frequency and maybe 1-2% more people who are driving take the bus. I doubt even that. Let's not pretend that's our real choice.

I actually think if we doubled the frequency, we'd get Toronto like share of transit usage, because that would be an incredible system.

But that's aside the point. Nobody is talking about doubling the frequency. Just not spacing buses 30 mins apart. In some cases during commuting hours. I think if you have enough justification to run a route, you can probably justify 20 min headways. Especially given how many routes use high capacity buses even when they are running 30 mins apart.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

I actually think if we doubled the frequency, we'd get Toronto like share of transit usage, because that would be an incredible system.

But that's aside the point. Nobody is talking about doubling the frequency. Just not spacing buses 30 mins apart. In some cases during commuting hours. I think if you have enough justification to run a route, you can probably justify 20 min headways. Especially given how many routes use high capacity buses even when they are running 30 mins apart.

That's straight up delusion. You could make busses every 2 minutes and we aren't getting Toronto level as people have last mile issues, own cars, access to parking and will still sit in traffic on a bus.

30 minutes is ridiculous though agreed.

[lrt's friend]

Right now, we are doing nothing to improve the bus network. We are depending only on rail which offers only a very basic network. We are on the hook with rail and with all the axes to grind between 2006 and 2012, we ended up with a lousy financial deal on rail. This is a major reason for bus cuts because of the capital cost of rail is more than the city can fund.

We cannot turn this around without even a modest plan to improve service on key routes. Yet we see grandiose plans. for Baseline and Merivale where we have to improve cycling at the same time. it is probably a good idea but it inflates the cost and delays transit improvement by years or décades. We need less expensive solutions. Frequency alone will improve transit even if buses continue to bé held up in traffic. Simply, we will reduce transfer wait times which alone will improve travel times. The New Ways to Bus made travel times worse because it added often inefficient transfers. Improved frequency is the simplest way to improve the transit network without enormous capital cost and the years of delays waiting for approval, design and construction .

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

That's straight up delusion. You could make busses every 2 minutes and we aren't getting Toronto level as people have last mile issues, own cars, access to parking and will still sit in traffic on a bus.

You act as though people in Toronto can't drive.

Again. Downs-Thomson paradox. Dunno how many times it has to be explained. Travel times between traffic and transit are always seeking to converge within the tolerance for what people will accept. In Toronto, traffic is now a permanent state of affairs. Takes hours to get anywhere on the 401. So every bus and train they add fills up.

Ottawa is actually getting close to that state of affairs at certain times of day. If traffic gets worse, we'll actually get there. So yes, I do think if we put on more buses during rush hour, we'd fill then. Let's just say after Stage 2, cause travel times are still pretty ridiculous due to construction.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Right now, we are doing nothing to improve the bus network. We are depending only on rail which offers only a very basic network. We are on the hook with rail and with all the axes to grind between 2006 and 2012, we ended up with a lousy financial deal on rail. This is a major reason for bus cuts because of the capital cost of rail is more than the city can fund.

We cannot turn this around without even a modest plan to improve service on key routes. Yet we see grandiose plans. for Baseline and Merivale where we have to improve cycling at the same time. it is probably a good idea but it inflates the cost and delays transit improvement by years or décades. We need less expensive solutions. Frequency alone will improve transit even if buses continue to bé held up in traffic. Simply, we will reduce transfer wait times which alone will improve travel times. The New Ways to Bus made travel times worse because it added often inefficient transfers. Improved frequency is the simplest way to improve the transit network without enormous capital cost and the years of delays waiting for approval, design and construction .

To be fair, nothing will get better till construction is done. The question is really about what the feeder network should be like post 2027. And right now, we're on track to have a feeder network with 30 min headways on a lot of routes, which is pretty useless. It degrades the value of the rail network by not feeding enough riders. And then people like you will whine about how much of a waste rail is.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

To be fair, nothing will get better till construction is done. The question is really about what the feeder network should be like post 2027. And right now, we're on track to have a feeder network with 30 min headways on a lot of routes, which is pretty useless. It degrades the value of the rail network by not feeding enough riders. And then people like you will whine about how much of a waste rail is.

i am not saying that rail is a waste, but we need a better feeder and secondary fréquent bus network. The problem is the outgoing expérience, rail to bus. Those 30 minutes buses make the trip home a big turn off. i have said this for over 10 years as everybody was glowing about bus to rail and only waiting a few minutes for a train. It is a two way trip and it is rail to bus that we have failed miserably on. We are really talking about the same thing.

[OTSkyline]

Obviously improved bus service would go a long way but even outside of that, I wonder how much the increase in return to office for the federal government and the opening of LRT East extension will have a positive impact on transit usage.

[Richard Eade]

Yes, the ideology that any major road rebuild MUST create a ‘Complete Street’ is, I fear, a huge mistake.

Baseline Road is an excellent example. There is no space for a ‘Complete Street’ as it is. To create one will require lots of land acquisition, which adds tens of millions of dollars to the project cost. And because of that extra cost, the much-needed transit improvement continues to be delayed.

The Baseline BRT should not be waiting for the required ‘Complete Street’ capital budget. Since the bus lanes are in the median, they can be built without extra property being required. The cost to add ONLY median transit lanes would be tens of millions of dollars less than building a ‘Complete Street’. That should allow the bus lanes to be constructed as soon as practical – leaving the peripheral cycling infrastructure to be added when that is practical.

So, in my opinion, what the City should be doing with Baseline Road:
1) Install the median bus lanes; pushing the general vehicle lanes out to the existing sidewalks. If practical, allow for wider outside lanes for bikes – but not necessarily full, painted bike lanes, if they don’t fit.
2) In the future, install the Cycle Tracks as practical. Perhaps waiting for property turn-over and/or redevelopment. This will disrupt the outside traffic lanes – potentially driving people onto the faster transit, running in the median.

Yes, this delays the cycling infrastructure, but it expedited the transit infrastructure that has been needed (and delayed) for many years. And, believe it of not, a lot more people use transit that their bikes in this city.

The City wouldn’t even have to redo the environmental assessments. The work is simply being done in phases, over time.

Adding extra buses along the existing congested Baseline Road does not attract new riders to transit. The biggest reason that bus service USED to be so popular in Ottawa was the Transitways. Having exclusive corridors for transit made it fast and efficient for riders. And there were few transfers. These benefits have been removed with the conversion of the Transitways to rail. Adding dedicated bus lanes onto Baseline Road will again allow buses to be faster than cars – in one corridor, anyway.

[OCCheetos]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

Yes, the ideology that any major road rebuild MUST create a ‘Complete Street’ is, I fear, a huge mistake.

Baseline Road is an excellent example. There is no space for a ‘Complete Street’ as it is. To create one will require lots of land acquisition, which adds tens of millions of dollars to the project cost. And because of that extra cost, the much-needed transit improvement continues to be delayed.

The Baseline BRT should not be waiting for the required ‘Complete Street’ capital budget. Since the bus lanes are in the median, they can be built without extra property being required. The cost to add ONLY median transit lanes would be tens of millions of dollars less than building a ‘Complete Street’. That should allow the bus lanes to be constructed as soon as practical – leaving the peripheral cycling infrastructure to be added when that is practical.

So, in my opinion, what the City should be doing with Baseline Road:
1) Install the median bus lanes; pushing the general vehicle lanes out to the existing sidewalks. If practical, allow for wider outside lanes for bikes – but not necessarily full, painted bike lanes, if they don’t fit.
2) In the future, install the Cycle Tracks as practical. Perhaps waiting for property turn-over and/or redevelopment. This will disrupt the outside traffic lanes – potentially driving people onto the faster transit, running in the median.

Yes, this delays the cycling infrastructure, but it expedited the transit infrastructure that has been needed (and delayed) for many years. And, believe it of not, a lot more people use transit that their bikes in this city.

The City wouldn’t even have to redo the environmental assessments. The work is simply being done in phases, over time.

Adding extra buses along the existing congested Baseline Road does not attract new riders to transit. The biggest reason that bus service USED to be so popular in Ottawa was the Transitways. Having exclusive corridors for transit made it fast and efficient for riders. And there were few transfers. These benefits have been removed with the conversion of the Transitways to rail. Adding dedicated bus lanes onto Baseline Road will again allow buses to be faster than cars – in one corridor, anyway.

I can't think of many times where it'd be more practical to add cycling infrastructure than while rebuilding the entire road, but maybe that's just me.


It feels bizarre how you keep singling out cycling infrastructure as if it's the single biggest obstacle to the Baseline BRT being built. Oh, it might save tens of millions of dollars? That doesn't make up for the other $200M+ still needed to build the median bus lanes. It also just piles on the cost of adding that cycling infrastructure "when convenient" to some later date, when construction costs and the inconvenience of doing so will have increased.

Meanwhile on Carling, there is a fully approved and funded plan to add dedicated bus lanes with no cycling or "complete street" measures included and yet that plan has completed stalled out for other nonsense reasons. So I'm beginning to think there's more to it than "complete street requirements".

This will disrupt the outside traffic lanes – potentially driving people onto the faster transit, running in the median.

This gives me a great idea. We can have a complete street and median bus lanes by removing a lane of general traffic. And as you say, that'll potentially drive people onto the faster transit, running in the median!

[Richard Eade]

Yeah, it is probably just you.

With a BRT being added along Baseline Road, I would expect a lot of redevelopments to follow. I think that this might be a more practical time to add cycling infrastructure, since the City might be able to take advantage of other mechanisms for acquiring land – without causing so much distress for the land owners. Imagine, if you can, the City coming in and taking a strip of front lawn from a house, such that the residents can no longer (legally) keep their car on their driveway. Or, imagine, if you can, a business or apartment building that is going to lose a row of parking, which would adversely affect the business. Alternatively, imagine, if you can, a developer who collects a few properties to build a new multi-unit building; and during the consultations with the City has the ability to design the new building around transferring the required property to the City.

It will take longer, and it might cost more in the long-run to build the cycling infrastructure later, but it might be more practical for the property owners. The City has experience negotiating property acquisition over time.

It feels bizarre that you keep saying that I am singling out cycling infrastructure as the single biggest obstacle to the Baseline BRT. Especially when I have not done that. The need to take property – whether it is for cycling infrastructure or not – adds a lot of cost to a project that spans many kilometres in length. Adding cycling tracks to this project makes the required corridor considerably wider. If the City wanted to make 10-metre-wide sidewalks along Baseline (and no cycle tracks), forcing additional property needs, I’d disagree with that, too. In this case, regular sidewalks already exist; it is the cycle tracks that are being added. If the existing RoW was wide enough to hold a ‘Complete Street’, I would have less objection to the change.

(I’m still not convinced that Baseline is the best place to funnel all the cyclists, however. I fear that this will become a huge, wide, sterile, throughway, that will not be hospitable for anyone to travel along. Basically, the plan is to add ‘family-friendly’ cycling along a ‘STRODE’. A Sunday afternoon family ride along a traffic sewer sure sounds like fun to me - not.)

I’m of the opinion that the City could more easily afford to build a transit project of, say, $180M than a ‘Complete Street’ project that requires the outlay of, say, $280M. Those are not exact numbers, but are illustrative. Basically, I think that the higher price tag of a ‘Complete Street’ along Baseline pushes the project out of the ‘affordable’ range. If some components were delayed, I think that the current price could be reduced, which might allow the transit portion of the project to be built – instead of being pushed off until a big bag of money falls from the sky.

Maybe if I explain it like this: Adding median bus lanes, which I think can mostly fit within the existing RoW, will cost a certain amount. If a whole lot of extra property needs to be bought along nearly the entire length of the project, then that will add a large extra cost to the project. The reason that so much extra property would be needed for this project is the addition of cycle tracks. One of the reasons that the Baseline BRT has not been constructed, as designed, is its high estimated cost. If the immediate cost can be reduced by only building the most important component now a large part of the functionality can be achieved.

Sure, you are keen to build the whole ‘Complete Street’. Fine. But don’t make transit riders suffer because adding the bike infrastructure to this project pushes the price into the ‘unaffordable’ range. Le Mieux est l’ennemi du bien. – Voltaire.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

You act as though people in Toronto can't drive.

Again. Downs-Thomson paradox. Dunno how many times it has to be explained. Travel times between traffic and transit are always seeking to converge within the tolerance for what people will accept. In Toronto, traffic is now a permanent state of affairs. Takes hours to get anywhere on the 401. So every bus and train they add fills up.

Ottawa is actually getting close to that state of affairs at certain times of day. If traffic gets worse, we'll actually get there. So yes, I do think if we put on more buses during rush hour, we'd fill then. Let's just say after Stage 2, cause travel times are still pretty ridiculous due to construction.

You are like the Repubs in Kansas trying to use the Laffer curve to claim cutting taxes will raise revenue. We in Ottawa are nowhere the point where transit is competitive on time for the vast proportion of non transit users and given our built form this is impossible for a much bigger swath of the population than Toronto. This is really obvious so I am not sure if we are even aruging that point.

[OCCheetos]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

Sure, you are keen to build the whole ‘Complete Street’. Fine. But don’t make transit riders suffer because adding the bike infrastructure to this project pushes the price into the ‘unaffordable’ range. Le Mieux est l’ennemi du bien. – Voltaire.

In typical fashion, your argument relies on several consecutive assumptions that all need to be true, and all of them are built on a very shaky foundation at best.

"The Baseline BRT isn't being built because it must be unaffordable because of land acquisitions because of complete street requirements like bike lanes."

Except most of the land is needed to add two new bus lanes, platforms, all while retaining existing traffic lanes.
It's classified as "unaffordable" because the city has decided to no longer fund new transit capital projects on its own.

So how much of this is really caused by the inclusion of cycle tracks? Would removing complete street requirements really save over $100M? Would that really bring this into the realm of "affordability"? I have a hard time believing any of that without evidence, yet you've levied an entire diatribe against cycling infrastructure based on that flimsy "illustrative" assumption among others.

(I’m still not convinced that Baseline is the best place to funnel all the cyclists, however. I fear that this will become a huge, wide, sterile, throughway, that will not be hospitable for anyone to travel along. Basically, the plan is to add ‘family-friendly’ cycling along a ‘STRODE’. A Sunday afternoon family ride along a traffic sewer sure sounds like fun to me - not.)

There's something deeply out of touch with treating a "family-friendly" cycle track as something only worthwhile if its main purpose is for family rides on a Sunday afternoon.

Who cares about commuters, delivery works, and literally any other person just trying to get around efficiently and safely? Baseline is lined with plazas and neighbourhoods, all of which someone might want to reach by bike. How is that so hard to imagine?

Have you seen the design of the new Greenbank intersection? What do you think is adding the most to the cost: eight lanes or three metres-worth of safe cycling infrastructure? By all means if we can't surmount the "unaffordability" of this design, maybe we should be pragmatic about this and look at where we can cut costs without removing the whole "safe transportation infrastructure" aspect of it?

$80M or $180M or $280M, like it or not the city is waiting for upper levels of government to fund the Baseline BRT. The complete street argument is completely irrelevant.
Now onto more pressing matters like, again, why Carling's bus lanes are still unimplemented despite the lack of complete street elements and a fully allocated budget.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

We won't split the difference though. The standing practice is to buy a larger proportion of high capacity buses and keep the schedule as minimal as possible.

I don't understand the hate for high-capacity buses, because as someone who uses transit for every trip that can't be accomplished on foot, 40-foot buses are the bane of my existence. They are simply not up to the job on the routes I take most frequently, regardless of how often you run them. And running them more often simply leads to brigading, with no actual increase in the real-world frequency of service, so that we are running two vehicles, with two drivers, collecting two pension eligibilities.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Right now, we are doing nothing to improve the bus network.

We are, in fact, doing things to make it worse.