The future of Ottawa's Transit

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

Assuming that the Transitway will come from Hurdman along the Altavista Corridor, what do you think of this route to get to Blair Station?



It makes use of discontinued rail line corridors which might be able to be re-activated for LRT service: Including the existing underpass at the 417. All of the existing large roads are not affected. However, it does make use of Bantree and would require the expropriation of (or tunnelling under) the scrap yard at the east of Bantree. Since this would be Brownland, it shouldn't be too hard to run a transitway across it. Perhaps it could even be used as a light service yard or garage. I think that the Bantree lanes could be moved to side streets with minimum disruption. The property just to the east of the 417 underpass is already City property (1951 Cyrville).

The red line is the main one for this exercise, but the blue lines offer future expansion potential. There is a line up to the Train Yards shopping area and one which goes directly to the growth area of Orleans. The red line provides a station at the Museum and the main Innes shopping area to promote all-day travel. (Yes, the museum might move, but it would likely be replaced with a high density development.)

I think this is the type of line which could be more economically built as rail right from the start. I know that the plan seems to be using BRT for this line, at least for the foreseeable number of years, but if this is built as rail - using existing facilities - then it could take the main passenger load from Orleans during conversion of the northern route (if that was required).

So; what do you think? Good idea, or bad idea?

I would favour a more direct route along Innes. Between St. Laurent and the Via Rail overpass, the Innes Corridor has extra space along the south side where tracks could be laid without having to use the underpasses. It would then be possible to veer south along the Via Rail track to the Highway 417 underpass. At Blair, the terminus should be as close as possible to the Queensway pedestrian overpass to facilitate transfers at Blair station. This would require the construction of a rail underpass at Blair Road, but I think it is important to offer easy transfers at this location. Thinking further ahead, we need to design for extension across the Queensway to connect to rail lines that will be built there, so there will be lots of considerations at Blair station, which will likely become a major transit hub.

As far as going further east, the CPR right of way would be cheap but goes through too much vacant Greenbelt land. A more northerly route along Innes may be more expensive to build but would be more convenient to a larger population base. We could consider a route skirting the south edge of Blackburn Hamlet, or even following Innes Road right through the heart of Blackburn Hamlet, which was designed for 4 traffic lanes but only uses 2 lanes, giving space for LRT. The downside of the latter is the number of level crossings. Going further east, connect into the Cumberland Transitway corridor via Navan Road.

[lrt's friend]

I have just been to the Toronto Metrolinx website and I have observed that they are identifying projects that can improve transit the fastest as the first step in implementing the Moving Ontario 20/20 plan. In other words, priorities are not being set based on politics but based on what can reasonably be accomplished quickly while the bigger projects go through their Environmental assessments and design phases. What they are doing is buying additional rail cars to supplement existing Go Transit service, building sidings at key locations in order to improve service and introducing or improving bus routes that will eventually be converted to BRT or LRT. All things that can be accomplished in a year or two. This all seems to be a sensible strategy whereas we are fully expecting tremendous political interference in establishing priorities in the coming months and pressure to do the big project first even if it takes 10 years. The result will almost certainly be further delays in getting anything meaningful accomplished. After examining what Toronto is doing, I think the 'tunnel first' approach is a mistake, simply because of how long it will take to get it opened. I am not saying to delay the tunnel, but we should be moving forward quickly on other shorter term projects while the tunnel is being planned. I think we should be concentrating on getting the overall plan correct including the secondary routes, build the business case for it all, and then get the support of the federal and provincial governments for the overall plan. Only after that initial approval, should we be moving forward to set priorities and it might be beneficial to have OC Transpo a little more independent from City Council, so that priorities can be based on the overall picture and implementation strategies instead of the selfish political needs of individual councillors and silly compromises that don't make sense.

Let the politicians be involved in developing the plan, but implementation should mainly be the responsibility of planners.

[p_xavier]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Let the politicians be involved in developing the plan, but implementation should mainly be the responsibility of planners.

One of the main issues I have with transit planning is its funding. It should come from ONE source. This leads to duplication of studies, useless EAs, and political bickering.

Having OC Transpo as a commission will probably resolve some part of the planning issues, or accentuate the problems. The budget may be cut off enormously from council, and quality will decrease. There should also be strict guidelines to what levels of transit service is needed. I know for Metrolynx, above 3000pph it's LRT and above 12kpph it's subway.

Just this would remove much of these political fights.

[Dado]

I don't have a view one way or the other on a transit commission, though I do think that some of the recent moves to consolidate the various parts of the bureaucracy that support OC Transpo's operations into one department within the city is a good idea.

On the subject of a transit commission though, I would just add this piece of food for thought: it was the former transit commission that was in no small part behind the original decision to go with an all-BRT system in the late 1970s whereas the city-run transit departments in Calgary and Edmonton went with light rail. Perhaps that's just coincidence, but it is an interesting one. I would also note that Ottawa transitionned from a transit commission in the late 1990s just as the costs of running a BRT system began to spiral out of control and capacity concerns began to appear.

My worry in all this is that a department vs commission debate sidetracks us from addressing the main problem: the sheer inefficiency of BRT forming the backbone of the transit system at the kind of passenger levels we have in Ottawa. This debate started (in the late 1990s) just as these problems began surfacing but back then it was attributed to the form of organization/governance rather than the nature of the system. Let's not rehash a pointless debate but instead fix the fundamentals of the system and then debate about the best way to run it thereafter.

[TransitZilla]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

I have just been to the Toronto Metrolinx website and I have observed that they are identifying projects that can improve transit the fastest as the first step in implementing the Moving Ontario 20/20 plan. In other words, priorities are not being set based on politics but based on what can reasonably be accomplished quickly while the bigger projects go through their Environmental assessments and design phases. What they are doing is buying additional rail cars to supplement existing Go Transit service, building sidings at key locations in order to improve service and introducing or improving bus routes that will eventually be converted to BRT or LRT. All things that can be accomplished in a year or two. This all seems to be a sensible strategy whereas we are fully expecting tremendous political interference in establishing priorities in the coming months and pressure to do the big project first even if it takes 10 years. The result will almost certainly be further delays in getting anything meaningful accomplished. After examining what Toronto is doing, I think the 'tunnel first' approach is a mistake, simply because of how long it will take to get it opened. I am not saying to delay the tunnel, but we should be moving forward quickly on other shorter term projects while the tunnel is being planned. I think we should be concentrating on getting the overall plan correct including the secondary routes, build the business case for it all, and then get the support of the federal and provincial governments for the overall plan. Only after that initial approval, should we be moving forward to set priorities and it might be beneficial to have OC Transpo a little more independent from City Council, so that priorities can be based on the overall picture and implementation strategies instead of the selfish political needs of individual councillors and silly compromises that don't make sense.

Let the politicians be involved in developing the plan, but implementation should mainly be the responsibility of planners.

I totally agree with this approach to priority-setting, but I think this is already being done here to some effect, with the Bayshore-Pinecrest and Fallowfield-Strandherd Transitways are short-term projects that have EAs completed that should greatly improve transit service to Kanata and Barrhaven, and the 4 new park and ride lots will increase park and ride capacity, especially in the south where Greenboro has been at capacity for years.

I wish more transit priority measures on busy arterials would be implemented: they're cheap, provide benefits quickly and increase efficiency of the service. Given the high hourly operating cost of buses, having them sit in traffic doesn't make much sense.

[lrt's friend]

and the 4 new park and ride lots will increase park and ride capacity, especially in the south where Greenboro has been at capacity for years.

There is definitely a need for more Park n Ride lots in the south, but if we build them and not run rapid transit to them, they will be of limited value. There has been a Park n Ride lot at the old Gloucester Town Hall at Leitrim for years, but because the transit link there is so poor, virtually nobody uses it.

It has just been announced that a Marriott Hotel will be built adjacent to Walkley Station. It is a shame that the hotel will likely be built before the station and therefore integration of the hotel and station will likely not occur. Another lost opportunity.

[citizen j]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

I have just been to the Toronto Metrolinx website and I have observed that they are identifying projects that can improve transit the fastest as the first step in implementing the Moving Ontario 20/20 plan. In other words, priorities are not being set based on politics but based on what can reasonably be accomplished quickly while the bigger projects go through their Environmental assessments and design phases. What they are doing is buying additional rail cars to supplement existing Go Transit service, building sidings at key locations in order to improve service and introducing or improving bus routes that will eventually be converted to BRT or LRT. All things that can be accomplished in a year or two. This all seems to be a sensible strategy whereas we are fully expecting tremendous political interference in establishing priorities in the coming months and pressure to do the big project first even if it takes 10 years. The result will almost certainly be further delays in getting anything meaningful accomplished. After examining what Toronto is doing, I think the 'tunnel first' approach is a mistake, simply because of how long it will take to get it opened. I am not saying to delay the tunnel, but we should be moving forward quickly on other shorter term projects while the tunnel is being planned. I think we should be concentrating on getting the overall plan correct including the secondary routes, build the business case for it all, and then get the support of the federal and provincial governments for the overall plan. Only after that initial approval, should we be moving forward to set priorities and it might be beneficial to have OC Transpo a little more independent from City Council, so that priorities can be based on the overall picture and implementation strategies instead of the selfish political needs of individual councillors and silly compromises that don't make sense.

Let the politicians be involved in developing the plan, but implementation should mainly be the responsibility of planners.

Yes, you're right. The city should have a kind of bi-focal approach (although that particular term might make the whole process sound somewhat geriatric); that is, short-term and long-term growth. In fact, isn't that exactly what the current plan proposes? More than a billion dollars to be spent on completing the Transitway to Kanata, BHTC, and Cumberland, and the purchasing of more buses long before the completion of the downtown tunnel?

However, in comparing Ottawa to Toronto you need to recognize that the TTC addressed its downtown bottleneck back in 1954, 1963, and 1966 with the construction of three central subway lines (with subsequent extensions out into the edges of the city in later years), whereas Ottawa has still to solve the fundamental issue of how to process passengers efficiently through the core now and in future years as numbers climb. The current round of expansion plans in Toronto builds on the subway infrastructure already in place in addition to an extensive streetcar grid in the pre-war city, without which the TTC would not be talking about BRT and LRT in the far north, east, and west but would be focusing instead on the core first. And in spite of what some might want to believe, bus technology in this system feeds into and is dependent on an efficient rail infrastructure, and couldn't function without it.

[waterloowarrior]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

It has just been announced that a Marriott Hotel will be built adjacent to Walkley Station. It is a shame that the hotel will likely be built before the station and therefore integration of the hotel and station will likely not occur. Another lost opportunity.

there has been some planning about the integration of this development with a future LRT station... although maybe you are looking for something bolder
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=151044

[lrt's friend]

When the N-S LRT project was still a go, there was talk of integrated development at both Carleton University and at Walkley Station.

[Dado]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

It has just been announced that a Marriott Hotel will be built adjacent to Walkley Station. It is a shame that the hotel will likely be built before the station and therefore integration of the hotel and station will likely not occur. Another lost opportunity.

With respect to future development at that site, the developers say:

"This site has a significant future potential to be more closely integrated with the existing Transitway station and with either the O-Train or some other rail type transit service on the existing O-Train line."

So it can be integrated now if there was a willingness to add a station to the O-Train at Walkley, preferably with a siding. Do that and put one in at Gladstone with a siding too (a developer has been (or was) willing to way back in 2003) and you've got enough passing tracks to get 7.5 min service (which would require two more trains).

In the long term, the SE Transitway should be converted to light rail (and not the O-Train) for a bunch of reasons, the main ones being cost and long term east-west balance through downtown. Lord knows what they are going to do when they get around to converting it in the long term anyway, because according to the ill-thought-out Option #4, the O-Train will be converted and then later the SE Transitway will be converted too.

[p_xavier]

Haha, I didn't even notice that, from last Monday's metro newspaper:

http://www.metronews.ca/ottawa/comment/article/73267

[Cre47]

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=e6929f65-b3c5-45ef-980a-17dc96a34e6c

[AuxTown]

"If it's supposed to be a nice drive to highlight the natural beauty of the city, why should it only be for cars, walking or cyclists? Why not transit?"

"The Transitway runs along Scott Street and starts again at Lincoln Fields, and we've sunk a lot of money into it," he explains. "There are other options to the parkway, but the cost would be enormous, and we can do something very nice on the parkway that's less disruptive than the buses currently are. To me, it's the only choice."

Well freakin' said. Screw the NIMBYs!

[Mister F]

Originally Posted by citizen j

However, in comparing Ottawa to Toronto you need to recognize that the TTC addressed its downtown bottleneck back in 1954, 1963, and 1966 with the construction of three central subway lines (with subsequent extensions out into the edges of the city in later years), whereas Ottawa has still to solve the fundamental issue of how to process passengers efficiently through the core now and in future years as numbers climb. The current round of expansion plans in Toronto builds on the subway infrastructure already in place in addition to an extensive streetcar grid in the pre-war city, without which the TTC would not be talking about BRT and LRT in the far north, east, and west but would be focusing instead on the core first. And in spite of what some might want to believe, bus technology in this system feeds into and is dependent on an efficient rail infrastructure, and couldn't function without it.

Toronto's downtown bottlenecks are anything but addressed. The Yonge subway is at capacity and Yonge-Bloor station in particular is severely overcrowded. Toronto's downtown subway system is small for a city its size. The fastest-growing areas of downtown, which are east and west of the financial district, have no subway access and none is planned. The streetcar lines serving these areas are slow and crowded, even slower than the buses on Albert and Slater through downtown Ottawa (I've commuted every day on both).

The current round of expansion focuses mostly on the suburban and outer central areas, with lines that will feed into existing subway lines (especially Yonge) and put more pressure on the already overcrowded system. The current plans are a good start but they ignore downtown, where expansion is arguably needed the most. The downtown relief line would give Toronto the best bang for its buck, imo.

[citizen j]

^ All true. There needs to be another line built that essentially runs south along Don Mills, connects with the rail right of way south of Danforth, runs though downtown and then heads back out in a north-westerly direction towards York and Etobicoke. That said, the original point was that without addressing the question of downtown back in the 1940s to 1960s when the Yonge, University, and Bloor-Danforth lines were in planning and development, and without the current streetcar grid in place (crowded as it may be), there is no way that the TTC would NOT be focusing FIRST on the core in its current round of expansion plans. This, by way of analogy, in response to the argument that Ottawa's system could be planned and built in reverse (to perpetuate a mistake made back in the 80s and 90s when the Transitway was completed everywhere except downtown).

[lrt's friend]

(to perpetuate a mistake made back in the 80s and 90s when the Transitway was completed everywhere except downtown).

Mistake? We had a choice. Build the Transitways or spend the same money on a downtown tunnel. It was the correct decision at the time to generate the maximum benefit for the money available. Without the Transitways, there would be no point in building a tunnel, and with a tunnel, we could not afford to build the Transitways. We also have to realize that our past decisions have generated the ridership that will hopefully justify the construction of a tunnel. OC Transpo did not have the ridership in 1975-1980 to justify a tunnel when the Transitways were first on the drawing boards.

The situation in Toronto was quite different at the time of the initial subway construction. First of all, there were no alternatives but to build a subway. The streetcars on Yonge were already at capacity. Second, the TTC had accumulated considerable profits from war operations that were available for subway construction.

The difficulties Ottawa faces in funding a downtown tunnel are exactly the same problems faced by Toronto in building a downtown relief subway line. It is the extreme cost of building subways. Given a choice between building a relatively short very expensive subway or its current plan, Toronto is now making the same choices as Ottawa did in the 1970s and 1980s. With employment less and less concentrated downtown, it isn't necessarily a bad idea to improve transit outside of downtown and knowing that 10 times the surface track can be laid compared to subways.

[citizen j]

The choice to build a BRT system without a real core connection rather than an LRT system was made back in the mid to late 70s -- a time when reliable, predictable Provincial capital funding was in place. Was this a mistake? Your argument is compelling. Ottawa wasn't nearly as large then as it is now, and passenger numbers were lower. But the city wasn't static. Planners and politicians knew it would continue to grow. And the arguments put forward back in the 70s for building a "more affordable" system amounted to a deferred expenditure that the city is still dealing with, and now without the same kind of funding reliability (Provincial funding seems to be a matter of political whim rather than policy these days). It was never going to get cheaper to solve the downtown problem.

[lrt's friend]

What you say may be true, but still it would have doubled the cost of the original system. Whether funding was predictable or not at the Provincial level, it is unlikely the province would have allowed us to build a system at double the cost. I think we should count ourselves fortunate that we accomplished as much as we did at the time, since the TTC did not experience the same expansion of its rapid transit system during the same time period.

[citizen j]

Ceded.

[Mister F]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

The difficulties Ottawa faces in funding a downtown tunnel are exactly the same problems faced by Toronto in building a downtown relief subway line. It is the extreme cost of building subways. Given a choice between building a relatively short very expensive subway or its current plan, Toronto is now making the same choices as Ottawa did in the 1970s and 1980s. With employment less and less concentrated downtown, it isn't necessarily a bad idea to improve transit outside of downtown and knowing that 10 times the surface track can be laid compared to subways.

That's not entirely true. About 10 km of the Eglinton LRT line will be in a tunnel. The tunnel in Ottawa seems easy compared to that.

Originally Posted by citizen j

^ All true. There needs to be another line built that essentially runs south along Don Mills, connects with the rail right of way south of Danforth, runs though downtown and then heads back out in a north-westerly direction towards York and Etobicoke. That said, the original point was that without addressing the question of downtown back in the 1940s to 1960s when the Yonge, University, and Bloor-Danforth lines were in planning and development, and without the current streetcar grid in place (crowded as it may be), there is no way that the TTC would NOT be focusing FIRST on the core in its current round of expansion plans. This, by way of analogy, in response to the argument that Ottawa's system could be planned and built in reverse (to perpetuate a mistake made back in the 80s and 90s when the Transitway was completed everywhere except downtown).

I see your point. I agree, the tunnel really should be built first since downtown is where everyone's going and the biggest bottleneck in the system.

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

What you say may be true, but still it would have doubled the cost of the original system. Whether funding was predictable or not at the Provincial level, it is unlikely the province would have allowed us to build a system at double the cost. I think we should count ourselves fortunate that we accomplished as much as we did at the time, since the TTC did not experience the same expansion of its rapid transit system during the same time period.

No, but there was major expansion of GO Transit. No, it's not true rapid transit in any useful sense, but at the very least can be the groundwork for a European-style regional rail system. They're planning to electrify the lakeshore line so that's not that farfetched.