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Originally Posted by RTWAP
You want to protect the riders view of the trench? I ride it every day and I would rather ride a train on covered tracks and read my magazine than look at rock and concrete from the bus.
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It's too late to protect the views of transit riders between Dominion and Bayview. If we had built a surface LRT line on the former CPR corridor as some had suggested back in the 1970s, we would today have a far different environment along that corridor. That's a "should have been", but it's not too late to at least protect their access to daylight. I too would prefer to read - using daylight if at all possible. Right now cell phone coverage is largely unaffected by the trench (though the racket of the buses makes it hard to carry on a coverage, but I'm thinking more of other smartphone uses than
just speaking), but if you cover it then every provider has to have repeater stations built into the tunnel and that requires painful negotiations with the City of Ottawa, and so on.
I would also point out that when you cover a rail line, you make it a lot noisier for those onboard because the sound waves bounce back and amplify each other. You can hear this with the O-Train going through the Dow's tunnel compared to the trench sections immediately north of it. For people not in the train, there's only a little extra noise with an open trench - in those same sections of open trench north of the tunnel, if you're standing on the Prince of Wales Drive bridge over the line an O-Train passing beneath is an unremarkable event as far as noise is concerned - unlike buses in the Transitway trench.
Basically, I think much of the desire to cover the trench is based on people's experience with the noise of the buses and wanting to rid themselves of it.
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It's about space. We can put all the roadways underground. Maybe if all cars are fully electric we'll be able to do that, but not now. But LRT is already fully electric so we can easily put it underground through dense areas. And in the case of the Scott Street trench we could put land back into use that was previously devoted to fossil-fuel burning vehicles.
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The land is a 100' RoW, which is a standard lot depth. The corridor might look wider, but that's probably due to the 66' Scott Street RoW that abuts it, so the unused portions of both RoWs meld together to make it look wider than it is. Much of this combined corridor also has enormous trunk water and sewer services running along it. So for most of the corridor, from a development perspective, given the lack of opportunity for subsurface parking and the fact that the property is only 100' deep, you're basically limited to ground-oriented units fronting Scott with some kind of surface parking, probably accessed from the north side streets/lanes and probably having generous real and apparent setbacks from Scott to accommodate the water infrastructure that lies between the trench and Scott. Given all that we'd be talking about 3-4 storey townhouses for the most part, with them maybe being live-work units (with the parking and work unit level providing a "buffer" to the tunnel below from the residential units above); only at locations like Westboro Station or around Tunney's Pasture where other adjacent redevelopable properties exist could one realistically expect anything more. I'm not sure that one could really justify covering over the trench just to build a line of townhouses from Carruthers to Roosevelt, and even less so yet another linear park.
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