Quote:
Originally Posted by Kitchissippi
Personally, I like the proposed station on Rideau Street rather than the Mackenzie King bridge area, as it serves the Market area really well. The Market is the late night entertainment district, beyond the operating hours of the Rideau Centre. Also, having the station 10 storeys underground then having street access three storeys up on bridge level would just be ridiculous. The way to address the stupid view of the Rideau Centre management is to reverse the current situation: have the station under Rideau Street but remove most of the buses there and reroute them to the bridge. This would result in a calmer Rideau Street and maybe restore the street level shopping there. Less buses on Rideau would also less traffic on Wellington.
The other thing I like about what is currently planned is the potential for underground pedestrian link between the Sparks Street Mall and the Market, as well as the Canal, avoiding the ridiculous crosswalk situation on the Plaza Bridge area
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I do understand your point about providing a more direct transit service to the Byward Market area, but I still don’t think that it out-weighs the benefits of having a Mackenzie-King to Waller station.
The Byward Market is a big tourist draw and THE spot for night life in the city; both of these factors would help provide off-peak ridership. Also, a station under Rideau still provides direct access to the Rideau Centre and DND employees can walk through to DND-HQ. As for an underground walking connection between Sparks Street and the Market, I really, really don’t think that will happen; and I don’t think it should: The Confederation Square area is a very walk-able area and I (and the NCC, I’ll bet) would like it to encourage street-action.
On the other side of the coin (or Rideau Centre) is my idea of having a station stretching under the green-space from the Rideau Centre to the Desmarais Building AND a station spanning under the War Memorial, from Sparks Street to the Rideau Canal. Also, because this gives an extra station downtown, the Downtown-east Station can be pushed west to be under the intersection of Queen at Bank. I think it is more important to have a station under Bank Street than O’Connor.
Having two stations replace the proposed Rideau Station allows for a better distribution of station load. The Memorial Station, as I will call it, offers a single, central, point for tourists to remember and is very identifiable on the streets. Having a central location for tourists is not a small detail. I think the Rideau Station is too far east for tourists to easily see most of their desired destinations upon exiting the station.
Some of you might have believed the Staff when they said that there could possibly be an underground connection from the west side of the canal to a Rideau Station; this is actually very unlikely. In order to make that connection, most of the distance from the street-level access to the station would need to be excavated from the surface; cut and covered. I do not believe that this will happen under the Government Conference Centre nor across the Historic Rideau Canal.
Based on reasoning, I think we can discard the Staff’s “possible” distant station accesses and accept that the shafts will be columnar. There is going to be trouble enough opening up the surface for the narrow shafts so I don’t think huge excavations are going to be acceptable or, in most cases, possible.
Keeping with the excavations, the Memorial Station offers lots of opportunity to dig down without disruption to surface traffic. There can be excavation along Sparks Street, in the centre island of the Square itself, and between Elgin and the canal. For the Rideau Station, there is room where the Mackenzie Overpass is, but there is no opportunity to dig under the Government Conference Centre and the rest might need to be dug down under the Rideau Centre. Since deep holes tend to be wide holes, digging down from Rideau Street will likely involve closing the entire street to traffic, which will force those buses to be moved; likely to the Mackenzie-King Bridge which is already crowded with all of its own bus traffic. And, not only is constructing the Rideau Station MUCH more disruptive, it is technically more difficult and risky.
As can be seen in the above figure, there is a deep bedrock valley under the north of the Rideau Centre. To place a station under the that part of the Rideau Centre will require many piles to be cut and new underpinnings to be constructed; all from within the tunnel and station. Any differential settling will cause damage to the Rideau Centre. There is no such problem constructing the Memorial Station. Nor is there the same problem under the south of the Rideau Centre as the valley is much shallower there.
The following diagram is an older one, showing an alignment directly under the bridge, but it illustrates the point.
Notice that the tunnel and station are well within the bedrock, below any piles. Indeed, since the tunnel would not be ascending here, since the Campus Station is now also to be underground, the buffer space to the piles would be even greater. And even if there was a catastrophe and a pile sank, bridges are far more forgiving of small warps than multi-story buildings. As well, the placement of the station I suggested in mostly under the green-space that Waller runs through. Once a structure was in place to carry the traffic, the station excavation would be simple.
So technically, it is MUCH easier to build a station south of the Rideau Centre than under the north end of it. But there are other benefits to going south and the big one is that there is an extra station to provide easier and more distributed access to the subway.
The Staff plan to have two stations, Downtown-east and Rideau, handle the majority of the transit traffic seems unreasonable to me. Currently, between LeBreton and Campus there are 7 bus stops, excluding LeBreton and Campus; this will be replaced by 3 train stations in the Staff plan. In the main core, there are bus stations at Bank, Metcalfe, Mackenzie-King, and Laurier. Staff want one station at O’Connor and one under Rideau, and claim that the station accesses could “possibly” be quite some distance from the actual station position, thus providing the illusion of many, more closely spaced stations. Since, as I have mentioned above, the accesses will not likely be widely spaced, we will simply wind up with two very large, crowded stations.
Also, if, as I suggest, we have a station at the War Memorial, then this station will provide better access for people working west of the canal, say along Elgin, than a Rideau Station would.
Having a station to replace both the Mackenzie-King and Laurier Bus Stations also better captures riders from the new Conference Centre, DND-HQ, and the north of Sandy Hill and the University of Ottawa. There can be direct accesses to the new Conference Centre (remember they were forced to put aside $1.5M to help pay for a station), the Rideau Centre’s south end (does it really matter if your elevator rises ten stories or twelve? Once you are in it, the extra 10-12 seconds of ride can’t be that significant. The Rideau Centre might help pay for a south-end station, but probably not a north one since they don’t want it there.), DND-HQ (the link already exists), and the second phase of the Desmarais Building (when it gets built).
What about the several hundred late-night revellers from the Market area? I think they can easily walk either along Rideau/Wellington to the Memorial Station or along Nicholas to the Mackenzie-King Station. A few hundred do not out-weigh the needs of the thousands of commuters; whom this system is actually being built for, remember.
Is moving the buses from Rideau to the Mackenzie-King Bridge really a good idea? Currently buses which normally run on the bridge are re-routed to run on Rideau after 1 am and this would probably continue after the tunnel is in. I think it is better to keep the bus routes consistent and have them run on Rideau all the time. Also, once the STO buses weave their way down to Mackenzie-King, they will need to weave back up to Wellington to cross the Portage Bridge. What route would they take and how much disruption would they cause? Remember, one of the big drivers of this tunnel is to get rid of buses along Albert and Slater; to simply move the 140 STO buses, plus all the OC Transpo buses from Rideau, plus all of the residual surface buses after the conversion to Albert and Slater would defeat the purpose of this project. I don’t think the Downtown Coalition would accept the idea.
I think that the original transit layout through the core was well thought out during the initial design of the Transitway and unless there is a VERY compelling reason to change the traffic patterns which have been built-up over the past quarter century, I think that the new route through the core should try to offer as similar a system as possible; only adding enhancements, not negatives. I am not in favour of moving the rapid transit station to Rideau. As it stands, I have suggested effectively moving the Metcalfe stop north by two to three short-blocks, but I think that this is an acceptable compromise to provide better access for tourists and people who have more northern destinations. Also, since most of OC Transpo’s Rideau Street buses travel around Confederation Square, this provides the facility for direct vertical transfers between the subway and surface buses.
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