I go against the grain here. Having moved to Ottawa in 2011, I see BRT as a model for other cities. Yes, capacity is maxed out through the downtown and the Confederation line is a fantastic way to move forward as it will significantly lower operating costs, move more people along the trunk line and free up scarce resource ($$$) for expanded services elsewhere.
A city like Barrie should seriously consider planning for BRT in it's long term plans following the
Ottawa model, contrary to vocal opinions here that BRT was an expensive folly.
I'm still mulling over the Trillium Line conundrum:
I'd like to point out that I'm wholly in favour of using the Prince of Wales bridge as an
STO transitway to Bayview and the conversion of
Bayview into an interprovincial transit hub in the long term. This will further integrate mobility between the twin cities and
remove STO busses from Wellington and Rideau!
My gut is telling that a solution that works for everyone with the Trillium line is not possible for a number of reasons- one being scarce resources ($$$) for capital projects looking into the future, that means into the mid century in Ottawa (2040s). So if we're picking something, expanding the Trillium line to Riverside South MUST be the top priority as we have the opportunity here to capitalize on the choice of rolling stock- LRT- while NOT making the same mistakes of the past (cancelling the Chiarelli plan) and build a suburb that is revolves around a metro line. According to the city planning department the majority of all growth in Ottawa will occur outside the greenbelt in the suburbs and the majority of
that growth will occur in the Riverside South and Leitrim areas. For example: the Official Plan (2003) directs that Leitrim development area will accommodate 5500 households by 2021. (I’m looking at the imminent future). And the ultimate plan calls for 15,000 residents- hardly just trees.
That being said, with the Trillium Line servicing the Riverside South / Leitrim growth areas, and feeding into Bayview, this has the potential to scuttle the use of Bayview as an interprovincial transit hub, as the network will be out of balance with full trains coming in from the West, with more transfers from the growth areas of the South leaving no capacity for interprovincial transfers, killing the the top priority of an interprovincial transit hub. I recall some planning documents warning of this possibility.
Making Bayview the interprovincial transit hub is a vital necessity, I my opinion, when looking at the grand scale. This planning should already be finalized and incorporated into the design of the Bayview station but this is a failure of politics and jurisdiction in Ottawa. Where’s that interprovincial transit plan NCC?
This leads me to consider that expanding the S.E Transitway/Trillium Line as indicated the map above is the best plan for the network as a whole. For a number of reasons. One being that it balances the network better, allows for the use of Bayview as an interprovincial transit hub (keep in mind that Tunney’s is the 2nd largest employment node in the NCR), and the strengths of BRT work well for suburbs as local busses can wind through the streets and then merge onto the transitway to head directly to the transfer point at Hurdman. This capitalizes on the infrastructure already in place- the S.E transitway.
Another thing to consider:
Ontario was the 1st jurisdiction to phase out coal power generation in the world. This is a massive accomplishment that is not considered enough. If the global community is to seriously tackle climate change the single greatest effort needs to be the global phase out of coal power generation. We focus too much on things like oil sands and car emissions that are a drop in the bucket compared to coal power generation. Ontario gets 50% its base load from Nukes, 20% from Hydro, 16% from natural gas, and currently at the time of this writing 11% from wind which didn't even exist 8 years ago, in 2007. That’s 80% from zero emissions. And for the Ottawa area almost all of our power comes from hydro generation along the Ottawa & Madawaska rivers.
Why I’m talking about this? Well, in the next 10-15 years as the electric Confederation Line comes online, and
Bombardier(for example and others) work on bringing induction charging of electric vehicles to market, we could easily have the
totality of our public transit running on zero emissions, by 2030. That’s 30-40% of the mobility of the city moving via zero emissions. And transitways are the perfect location to install inductive charging pads.
So that wall of text are my musings on the subject.
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