Ottawa Rapid Transit Network developments

[RTWAP]

Originally Posted by Franky

So LRT is a make work, waste money project. Makes sense. This is bureaucratic thinking and it needs to change. We have SERIOUS problems with sewers and I'm sure there are other pressing needs we should be getting money for. Building legacy tunnels (so deep it's not even funny) and buying pretty buildings just isn't what the city needs. I hope Watson is serious about revisiting the boondoggle, I certainly don't want to pay for it and a good chunk of the population doesn't either.

Excuse me? Please don't put words in my mouth. While you might think the investment isn't worthwhile, I think it probably would be.

And we don't have a serious problem with sewers. We're doing the same thing many other cities are doing. We'd like to fix it. It will take time and money.

Tunnel depth is an interesting issue, and I've heard it will be investigated in detail during the EA.

[RTWAP]

Originally Posted by Richard Eade

I would prefer to see the surface lines travel more on pedestrian oriented roads, like Corso Italia and Somerset. Also, I couldn't see any big need to remove car capacity from Bronson since it seems to be one of the main roads heading downtown. Since Gladstone isn't really much in that area, I just moved the line to McLeod to access the Museum directly.



I think I swapped the blue and green, but you will get the point.

And, just for fun, I put the terminus in the new park beside the station. It doesn't matter if we own the building or not; this should work.

Excellent point, as usual.

And I like the park.

[RTWAP]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

First of all, I am not advocating the status quo. Second, I am not the one who said that we will be saving $100M per year in operating costs starting when the tunnel opens. When you see statements like this and proposed bus route rationalizations, how can we not come to the conclusion, that we will end up with a smaller transit system? It is not unreasonable to predict if this happens, there will also be fewer riders. I am not coming up with this from thin air. The saving figure has been published and the service rationalization has been discussed here.

Nobody is running on an LRT plan designed to permanently reduce transit service and/or transit funding. But if we can reduce operating expenses and increase capital expenses then we can grow the transit system more quickly. Those figures on the savings were presented in the context of how we would pay for these capital expenses.

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

A much longer time frame. I think it is not unreasonable to expect some benefits sooner.

We will have some benefits sooner. We'll have a reliable core network with rapid and frequent service that isn't subject to the ever increasing congestion and delays downtown. Also, trains are cool.

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

I think the Transitways have been a great success and they have improved the efficiency of the transit system. The Transitways are clearly upgradeable as almost all the rapid transit extensions in the future will be bus Transitways. It is even possible to upgrade the downtown section for far less than $2.1B by building a bus tunnel. Your argument does not really hold water. We seem to want a gold plated solution where the benefits are way off in the far distant future. I want to make it perfectly clear, that I am not necessarily advocating a bus tunnel, but to show that there are cheaper solutions where more of our money can be spent in actually delivering better service, attract more riders and generate more fares.

There's no doubt the BRT has been successful. But I haven't seen any viable suggestions for how to address core congestion issues with BRT. The solution to congestion is to reduce or eliminate the multiplicity of bus routes going through downtown. But doing that eliminates the one advantage BRT had over LRT, which was flexible direct routing. Without that you're left with more expensive operating costs, less environmentally friendly, and less pleasant passenger experience.

If we spent 10 years and $1B building more BRT to the east, west and south, we'd have saved a few minutes in travel time from those areas, and probably more than lost that much time in congestion downtown. And our operating expenses would be higher than we are now, which leaves less fiscal room to switch to a more scalable solution.

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Well, we have also discarded surface LRT used in all of those cities. Even downtown Calgary still has a lot of buses from parts of the city not served by LRT at present. Ottawa is proposing to eliminate almost all those buses except those routes serving centretown neighbourhoods. Only our transit planners would come up with a plan requiring people from the west and south to transfer to a LRT route serving only the east end.

Only the east end? I'm sorry, I'm not sure I'm following you. Is this a complaint that the system favours the east end because there are three more stations east of the tunnel than west? When the next increment adds probably 8 stations from Tunney's to Baseline, and probably 6 heading south from Bayview? And the increment after that extends LRT to RSTC?

And Ottawa will still have lots of buses downtown, just not the ones that would have spent substantial portions of their routes running parallel to an LRT line. We're not twinning the BRT with LRT, we're converting.

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Do you really believe what you say? The western route has proven to be very difficult. The path forward is going to be full of NIMBYs, which will jack up the costs at every turn. We have deliberately imposed ridiculous restrictions on extending LRT to suburbs and plan on overbuilding terminal stations that in themselves will discourage extension. By comparison, extending bus Transitways will be relatively easy. Even corridors where LRT would be easy to build, we have decided to build busways instead. You say once the core system is built, we can extend it. I don't see it happening as the money will be spent on Transitway extensions instead. You bring up the Maintenance Yard? Will we not need other Maintenance yards as we expand the system? I think so.

Did I not say that Tunney's to Lincoln Fields would be expensive? Yes, I did.

If I had my way we wouldn't be wasting any more money on BRT conversions because we'd be building more LRT as quick as possible. But some people are already complaining about funding the LRT core. It seems like our funding partners have no problem with spending hundreds of millions on more BRT, but not on LRT.

I certainly hope that the theoretical ability to cost effectively convert BRT to LRT is becoming a lot less theoretical and a lot more actual, now that the transit planning staff have an LRT project running.

[lrt's friend]

Only the east end? I'm sorry, I'm not sure I'm following you.

I am complaining because they are going to eliminate direct to downtown bus service to the south and west when there is no significant LRT service in those directions during Phase 1 or Increment 1 or whatever they choose to call it. Calgary did not do this. This is a — rationalization plan!! The planners don't give a rat's — whether the results will be convenient to the customers. All I can say, I am glad I don't need to go downtown very often.

As far as the improved experience, hmmmmm, won't most passengers have to stand especially during peak periods on those trains? Not saying there will be an alternative, but this is oversold. It is not like you are sitting back reading a book like you can do on a Go Train.

Here will be my LRT experience

1. Walk to a station downtown
2. Ride the Escalator down 10 storeys
3. Wait for the train
4. Stand on the Train
5. Walk to the bus stop at Hurdman
6. Wait for the bus
7. Stand on the Transitway bus
8. Transfer at South Keys
9 Wait for a local bus (the rationalization plan as proposed will cut local service in half)
10. Walk home (the walk will be much longer after the proposed rationalization plan)

I am jumping for joy because this is going to be so much better. Whoopee!!!

Is it no wonder why I am not sold on what we are doing? Also, with an aging population, all this standing is going to make transit less and less attractive.

[eternallyme]

Overall, how much money would be saved if LRT ran on the surface rather than in a tunnel? Would it be operationally possible without safety issues or without causing major traffic congestion downtown?

[MalcolmTucker]

^ Not enough, and the options for surface running aren't very good. You can save more money by making lots of small changes rationalizing the tunnel, maybe changing its route along with looking and pairing down the big stations. Unless you're going to run it on Sparks, which seems like a non-starter, surface running for the main east west line in somewhat mixed traffic would overwhelm the capacity of the road.

It is too bad Ottawa lacks the political will to close a street to traffic for the LRT. Then again if there was maybe the first project wouldn't have been stopped.

[MalcolmTucker]

Watson, McGuinty on board with LRT project

Premier Dalton McGuinty and mayoral candidate Jim Watson Thursday reiterated their support for Ottawa’s $2.1-billion light-rail project, clearing any lingering doubts and paving the way for the implementation of the plan.

Recent statements on the project by the premier, and particularly Watson, caused consternation among city politicians who feared the two influential provincial politicians were backing away from a plan they enthusiastically supported only a few weeks ago, when McGuinty announced Ontario’s $600 million contribution.

If the federal government also commits $600 million, the city will need to find $900 million to complete the project — more than the one-third share the city had been hoping it would have to cover.
....

More here from Ottawa Citizen

[Dado]

Originally Posted by RTWAP

Tunnel depth is an interesting issue, and I've heard it will be investigated in detail during the EA.

Unlikely. The EA process for transit projects has been turned into little more than a formality.

They (the proponents, i.e. the City, err, the City's consultants) basically announce that the EA process has begun after the planning process is complete. The planning process is expected to deal with all the environmental issues. This EA process requires that they hold an open house, in which the public provide some comments (which are really too late to affect anything, since that had to happen during the planning process, during which most comments were ignored). With comments in hand and a few excuses included why the public's comments make no sense for good measure, the entire Planning Study is submitted to the MoE with the EA process documents. This has to be done within two months of initiating the EA process. The MoE then has four months in which to review and approve the EA and so long as all the 'i's are dotted and 't's crossed, and so long as no First Nations put up a fuss, the plan is approved.

Something like tunnel depth really isn't going to be a factor in the MoE decision to approve unless it has some unmitigatible environmental impacts. They basically just want to know what it is you're planning to do, how you're going to do it, what its impacts are and how you're going to ensure you've mitigated them. They don't really care if the plan is a particularly good idea or not or if some of its elements —. Theoretically they used to, but not any more, at least not for transit. That's what the planning process is for - bad ideas and sucky elements are supposed to be weeded out of transit projects at that stage.

Originally Posted by RTWAP

Only the east end? I'm sorry, I'm not sure I'm following you. Is this a complaint that the system favours the east end because there are three more stations east of the tunnel than west? When the next increment adds probably 8 stations from Tunney's to Baseline, and probably 6 heading south from Bayview? And the increment after that extends LRT to RSTC?

These "increments" are all as yet unfunded, yet the extension to Baseline is pretty vital for a viable system. The Province has made it pretty clear that we're not going to be getting more than $600M for all transit projects for quite a while.

If I had my way we wouldn't be wasting any more money on BRT conversions because we'd be building more LRT as quick as possible. But some people are already complaining about funding the LRT core. It seems like our funding partners have no problem with spending hundreds of millions on more BRT, but not on LRT.

No, the money the Province has given us is for transit, not BRT or LRT specifically. The City will probably blow some of its provincial cash on BRT at Centrepointe.

I certainly hope that the theoretical ability to cost effectively convert BRT to LRT is becoming a lot less theoretical and a lot more actual, now that the transit planning staff have an LRT project running.

I'm waiting to see if they change the BRT design standards to make it more readily convertible, but I've seen no evidence of that as of yet.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Dado

I'm waiting to see if they change the BRT design standards to make it more readily convertible, but I've seen no evidence of that as of yet.

Wouldn't it even be better to build LRT directly without intermediate BRT steps? Unfortunately, we seem to be determined to waste money building for buses and then more to convert it. Most cities decide, is it BRT or LRT or HRT on a particular corridor? Not Ottawa. I can see in 20 years we will again want to change technology.

[blackjagger]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Wouldn't it even be better to build LRT directly without intermediate BRT steps? Unfortunately, we seem to be determined to waste money building for buses and then more to convert it. Most cities decide, is it BRT or LRT or HRT on a particular corridor? Not Ottawa. I can see in 20 years we will again want to change technology.

I would have to disagree with you on this comment. Most cities including Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver have chosen intermediate technology to increase capacity until future higher level transit can be implemented. An example being the BRT (not grade separated but still BRT) on what will be the future M-Line Extension to UBC. I have no problem with converting BRT to LRT if we can’t afford to build a full LRT system right away. What is the expectation for areas such as Barrhaven, Kanata, Riverside South or Southern parts of Orleans. That you are shit out of luck until LRT gets to you in 30 years.
I don’t think that this current plan is the best option. But at least its trying to move in the right direction. If we fail to implement this system will not be getting a third change for a very long time.

P.s. I would have chosen light metro or ALRT for an Urban system with at grade LRT for commuter routes to hub points along the Urban system.
Cheers,
Josh

[RTWAP]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

I am complaining because they are going to eliminate direct to downtown bus service to the south and west when there is no significant LRT service in those directions during Phase 1 or Increment 1 or whatever they choose to call it. Calgary did not do this. This is a crap rationalization plan!! The planners don't give a rat's ass whether the results will be convenient to the customers. All I can say, I am glad I don't need to go downtown very often.

As far as the improved experience, hmmmmm, won't most passengers have to stand especially during peak periods on those trains? Not saying there will be an alternative, but this is oversold. It is not like you are sitting back reading a book like you can do on a Go Train.

Here will be my LRT experience

1. Walk to a station downtown
2. Ride the Escalator down 10 storeys
3. Wait for the train
4. Stand on the Train
5. Walk to the bus stop at Hurdman
6. Wait for the bus
7. Stand on the Transitway bus
8. Transfer at South Keys
9 Wait for a local bus (the rationalization plan as proposed will cut local service in half)
10. Walk home (the walk will be much longer after the proposed rationalization plan)

I am jumping for joy because this is going to be so much better. Whoopee!!!

Is it no wonder why I am not sold on what we are doing? Also, with an aging population, all this standing is going to make transit less and less attractive.

So you're arguing in favour of a transit system that provides point-to-point service for some, and multiple transfers for others. Must be nice to be one of the lucky few.

Taking a step back for a second, congestion is requiring a reconfiguration away from the 'express buses to/from downtown' system design. That's going to require more transfers and more waiting. That's not an LRT problem. It's a growth problem.

Having to split your transitway time between LRT and buses IS a result of the LRT conversion, but what is the alternative? Building the whole system at once? Never doing LRT at all?

Personally, I would have liked the city to take a different approach to the rollout. Build a modest commuter rail system on existing rail lines, connect it to an LRT-converted O-train, and extend that to Ottawa U via a tunnel. For me, the big benefit is that when you start converting the BRT sections of the Transitway, you'll have a viable preliminary LRT system to handle a fair share of the suburban passenger load while the Transitway is unavailable (Nepean, Barrhaven, Kanata, Southern Ottawa) or you'll have a highway that you can put the BRT buses on temporarily while you convert (417/174).

There are hundreds of millions of dollars in the current plan devoted to managing the absolute chaos that will be generated during the construction years by having no Transitway at all in many places. I know that a little over a year ago, city councillors had been told that BRT-to-LRT conversion would be relatively easy and BRT operations would continue during the construction. That's bullshit.

I shudder to think what the service quality will be like during construction, when we have neither BRT nor LRT to downtown. I'd rather build a basic 'bypass' transit system, on secondary paths (not the ones we'd choose for our primary lines) and then convert the Transitway, starting with the eastern section. At the end of the day we'd be providing LRT to the entire city faster, and cheaper, followed by BRT conversion to LRT.

That's what I would have done. I think it would have been cheaper and provided better service throughout. And investments in BRT like the Fallowfield to BTC stretch and Moodie to SBP would never even be considered for BRT. They'd be LRT extensions right from the start.

Given that the city's goal is to drive the transit use figures from 23% to 30%, and given that growth-driven congestion will drive a change in the network configuration, service level degradation is inevitable in the short term. The question is whether we can come up with a sustainable LRT solution that eventually provides better service, at an affordable price.

[RTWAP]

Originally Posted by Dado

Unlikely. The EA process for transit projects has been turned into little more than a formality.

I thought one of the required steps was to evaluate alternatives and provide justification for choosing costlier approaches.

[c_speed3108]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

I am complaining because they are going to eliminate direct to downtown bus service to the south and west when there is no significant LRT service in those directions during Phase 1 or Increment 1 or whatever they choose to call it. Calgary did not do this. This is a crap rationalization plan!! The planners don't give a rat's ass whether the results will be convenient to the customers. All I can say, I am glad I don't need to go downtown very often.

As far as the improved experience, hmmmmm, won't most passengers have to stand especially during peak periods on those trains? Not saying there will be an alternative, but this is oversold. It is not like you are sitting back reading a book like you can do on a Go Train.

Here will be my LRT experience

1. Walk to a station downtown
2. Ride the Escalator down 10 storeys
3. Wait for the train
4. Stand on the Train
5. Walk to the bus stop at Hurdman
6. Wait for the bus
7. Stand on the Transitway bus
8. Transfer at South Keys
9 Wait for a local bus (the rationalization plan as proposed will cut local service in half)
10. Walk home (the walk will be much longer after the proposed rationalization plan)

I am jumping for joy because this is going to be so much better. Whoopee!!!

Is it no wonder why I am not sold on what we are doing? Also, with an aging population, all this standing is going to make transit less and less attractive.

Perhaps I had this wrong, but wasn't the plan to extend the local routes to the train stations. IE Orleans locals would go to Blair. Why wouldn't they just bring the south keys locals to Hurdman instead of the 97?

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by c_speed3108

Perhaps I had this wrong, but wasn't the plan to extend the local routes to the train stations. IE Orleans locals would go to Blair. Why wouldn't they just bring the south keys locals to Hurdman instead of the 97?

Let's be realistic. Not all the South Keys locals will be extended to Hurdman, and even more so, the Kanata and Barrhaven locals will not be extended to Tunney's Pasture. This is not in the cards.

My point is that in the name of cost savings and in order to get as many riders on the trains from Day 1, we are making thousands of people transfer to trains very close to downtown. We all know how transit riders feel about transfers. Again, this all points to a plan where the primary focus is on cost savings and not the customers. The customers will have the last say on this when the ridership figures end up disappointing. The one saving grace is that downtown commuters are really captive transit users because of parking costs and lack of availability. You will have to do a lot to them to drive them away.

[lrt's friend]

So you're arguing in favour of a transit system that provides point-to-point service for some, and multiple transfers for others. Must be nice to be one of the lucky few.

I am arguing exactly for that, but you paint it in such a negative way. It is really a rationale transition from the existing Transitway system to LRT. You know, Calgary still has direct to downtown bus routes from the north end and to the west end where there is no LRT service at present and it makes no sense to impose a LRT transfer very close to downtown. It is also not only about the express bus routes but also the impacts on local service during off-peak hours. How awkward will it really be to get to downtown? One of the selling points for LRT is that it will enable a more lively downtown. Well, that will not be the case if we make it difficult to use transit to get downtown before LRT has a reasonable build out. We need a better thought out transitional plan instead of some unnecessary mega transfer station at Tunney's Pasture that will not be needed once the western leg is built.

Having to split your transitway time between LRT and buses IS a result of the LRT conversion, but what is the alternative? Building the whole system at once? Never doing LRT at all?

We simply need a more customer oriented transitional transit plan. Don't try to remove all the suburban buses from downtown when we are initially only building a short LRT line. The reduction of downtown buses should happen gradually as LRT is extended in each direction. It is laughable that the reason for running Phase 1 to Tunney's Pasture was because it was an employment centre. There were clearly other agendas here in order to try to force the Ottawa River Parkway route and to block western buses from reaching downtown. I have really been fed up with how this plan was pre-determined and how the public consultations were designed to just rubber stamp what had already been decided with no intention to ever significantly change the plan based on public input. This has been such a turn off for me personally, that it will be a long, long time before I ever attend such a meeting again. My own personal interaction with the mayor at one of those meetings just emphasized that we had elected a mayor who didn't know what he was talking about.

Personally, I would have liked the city to take a different approach to the rollout. Build a modest commuter rail system on existing rail lines, connect it to an LRT-converted O-train, and extend that to Ottawa U via a tunnel. For me, the big benefit is that when you start converting the BRT sections of the Transitway, you'll have a viable preliminary LRT system to handle a fair share of the suburban passenger load while the Transitway is unavailable (Nepean, Barrhaven, Kanata, Southern Ottawa) or you'll have a highway that you can put the BRT buses on temporarily while you convert (417/174).

There are hundreds of millions of dollars in the current plan devoted to managing the absolute chaos that will be generated during the construction years by having no Transitway at all in many places. I know that a little over a year ago, city councillors had been told that BRT-to-LRT conversion would be relatively easy and BRT operations would continue during the construction. That's —.

I shudder to think what the service quality will be like during construction, when we have neither BRT nor LRT to downtown. I'd rather build a basic 'bypass' transit system, on secondary paths (not the ones we'd choose for our primary lines) and then convert the Transitway, starting with the eastern section. At the end of the day we'd be providing LRT to the entire city faster, and cheaper, followed by BRT conversion to LRT.

That's what I would have done. I think it would have been cheaper and provided better service throughout. And investments in BRT like the Fallowfield to BTC stretch and Moodie to SBP would never even be considered for BRT. They'd be LRT extensions right from the start.

Given that the city's goal is to drive the transit use figures from 23% to 30%, and given that growth-driven congestion will drive a change in the network configuration, service level degradation is inevitable in the short term. The question is whether we can come up with a sustainable LRT solution that eventually provides better service, at an affordable price.

We think more alike than you realize. My fear is that this plan will not achieve the desired 30% modal share unless we luck into it because of external factors, such as $3.00 per litre gas prices. I said early on that this plan delivers very little new rapid transit within the Greenbelt. Almost our entire investment within the Greenbelt will be used to address the downtown congestion issue, which forces existing rapid transit to be re-built. We do get Baseline BRT and Carling LRT very late in the timeframe, but you can bet that those will be the first to be cancelled if costs escalate higher than expected. It is very possible that our 2031 rapid transit network within the Greenbelt will be identical to today, just delivered by rail instead of buses. After billions of investment, it may be no easier or faster to move around the city inside the Greenbelt by transit.

Another interesting news story on Global at suppertime. Many concerns were brought up about the St. Clair streetcar in Toronto, which is the model for the rest of the Toronto Transit City LRT plan. The St. Clair streetcar is taking far longer to build and costs have continued to escalate even after construction began to the point that costs have almost doubled. This demonstrates that it is very hard to contain costs on rail transit and any other form of grade separated transit. I include busways here as well.

[reidjr]

While i do support the tunnel as that is needed.I do not support lrt as i don't think we need it.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

The St. Clair streetcar is taking far longer to build and costs have continued to escalate even after construction began to the point that costs have almost doubled. This demonstrates that it is very hard to contain costs on rail transit and any other form of grade separated transit. I include busways here as well.

St Clair runs at-grade, like Spadina, which is the type of project the tunnel opponents most often call for (and a good portion of the defunct Barrhaven Streetcar plan which they all seem to like).

Every infrastructure project in this city is over time and over budget: road reconstruction projects like Bank and King Edward, suburban road widening projects, buildings, etc.

[adam-machiavelli]

Apparently Larry O'Brien wants to now move the bus station out of downtown. See CBC Ottawa for details.

[eternallyme]

Originally Posted by adam-machiavelli

Apparently Larry O'Brien wants to now move the bus station out of downtown. See CBC Ottawa for details.

Not a bad idea if it moves to a Transitway hub, since it is currently located somewhere not well reached by anything.

[Jamaican-Phoenix]

Here's an idea; instead of continuing to move — out to the suburbs and middle of nowhere, the city gets its — in gear and takes control of Union Station and convert it for use for LRT and we run the Greyhound buses along Colonel By and make the new terminal right beside Union Station/under the bridge/the now-empty art gallery beside the Chateau Laurier.