Ottawa's new, little-discussed $200M Baseline busway
David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: September 15, 2016 | Last Updated: September 15, 2016 6:22 PM EDT
The city is reviving a dormant project to build a new Transitway along Heron and Baseline roads, a $200-million plan to move more bus passengers faster across the southern edge of downtown.
“Most people have no idea this is in the plans,” says River Coun. Riley Brockington, through whose ward the new Transitway would run, and who isn’t crazy about it.
First, the case in favour. The new busway would connect Billings Bridge and Bayshore malls, and along the way hit the government campuses at Confederation Heights and Clyde Avenue, Algonquin College and Centrepointe, and the Queensway Carleton Hospital. It would link with rail lines and busways at Heron station, Confederation Heights, Baseline and Bayshore.
The general route is included in the transportation master plan city council approved in 2013, as something the city wanted to get done by 2031, and there’s been
preliminary work in the can for years. But the last open house on it was more than two years ago, and every time there’s been a public presentation, the plan has become more ambitious and the time needed to study it has gotten longer.
We’re now up to a scheme to build 14 kilometres of dedicated busway, to be constructed in phases between 2019 and 2031 — the eastern part first, the part west of Algonquin later.
By then, the city expects 10,000 people a day riding buses in that corridor, up from 6,500 now, and that taking buses out of mixed traffic will cut 11 minutes off each trip. Which might not sound like much unless it’s your commute, twice a day every day, in which case it really adds up. Making Heron and Baseline a major transit route will spur redevelopments and more density along the corridor, the city expects.
“The result will be a transformed corridor for the 21st century that will accommodate thousands of new residents and employees all within walking distance of (a) high order transit facility that can be recognized nationally,” the city’s materials say.
Lanes running in each direction would go in the median, with regular traffic on the outside. Aside from dedicated bus lanes, the city plans to add bike tracks and wider sidewalks where there aren’t any. In some places, there’s room to add them; in others, it’ll mean taking over existing traffic lanes. But much of the way, it’ll mean widening the road, and that in turn will mean shaving off properties north and south — with the first priority being along the Experimental Farm.
“They need land between Prince of Wales and Clyde. I’ll leave it at that,” Brockington says. The stretch of Baseline between Prince of Wales Drive and Clyde Avenue, with the Experimental Farm on the north side, is a pretty good road but terrible for everyone else, with a complete sidewalk only on the south side and basically no allowance for bikes.
The thing is, since being elected in 2014, Brockington’s made protecting the Experimental Farm a priority and he doesn’t like the idea of asking the federal government to give some of it up for pavement. More broadly, he isn’t sure the busway as a whole is the best use of $200 million in transit money.
“When we politicians in the southern part of the city talk about transit expansions, we talk about fast-tracking the southern extensions of Phase 2 (of the light-rail plan),” he says.
The east end got the promise of rail to Place d’Orléans in the original iteration of the plan and is now within one federal news conference of an extension all the way to Trim Road. Same thing with a spur to the airport — the provincial government is already aboard for both of them. In the west, a promised terminus at Bayshore could end up moved as far west as Palladium Drive in Kanata once a federally supported study is done.
In the south, although the Phase 2 plan includes an O-Train extension to the eastern edge of Riverside South, there’s no promise of a line into Barrhaven until the 2030s at the earliest. Pulling $200 million from the Baseline plan would help lay a lot of track.
But it would mean taking that money away from something that’s already in the city’s transportation plan. Rail lines to Trim Road, the airport and Kanata are add-ons, potentially doable with extra money from the provincial and federal governments — the first two explicitly made the list of projects the city wanted to include in its 2013 plan but couldn’t afford. Abandoning the Baseline busway to spend the money on something else would be harder.
If you want to try to convince the city, the latest version of the Baseline plan is to be presented in public in early October.
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