LRT Stage 3

[Gat-Train]

Originally Posted by JayBuoy

I think the most realistic possibility for Montreal/Rideau would be surface RT/tram. Tunnelling wold make it too expensive. And all it would take is the political will (easier said that done, I know) to convert Montreal/Rideau, and even Bank to transit priority streets. That would enable a tram line.
Near term, though, I would like to see surface LRT on Carling, rather than bus lanes. With all the major proposals down that way it would make sense, and it's in the official plan.

The plan is only for LRT from Lincoln Fields to the Trillium Line. Kind of a short line. BRT would be better, as you can easily interline the 16, 85 and 57

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Gat-Train

The plan is only for LRT from Lincoln Fields to the Trillium Line. Kind of a short line. BRT would be better, as you can easily interline the 16, 85 and 57

Carling Avenue LRT is an example of the inflexibility of rail at its worst.

For most, it won't take you to your destination without a bunch of transfers.

To go downtown, it requires two transfers, or to go in reverse direction to make one transfer.

Bus routes east of Carling Station would be shortened so much that they would lose ridership because they don't take you anywhere other than transfer stations.

An effective transit system needs to respect customer travel desire lines and destinations and get you there without a lot of hassle.

[Kitchissippi]

Originally Posted by gjhall

Sure, but luckily the city is beginning the process of a new Official Plan.

A new Official Plan is really just a recompilation and synchronizing of the different Master Plans and policies. I would think we are at least a decade away from rehashing the Transportation Master Plan with regards to public transportation because we haven't even seen the results nor are we able to measure its effect to commuting patterns and shaping the city.

One thing I've come to understand after living through and engaging with the way this plan turned out is how this city really works on due process. It's a slow steering ship with many hands on the rudder. Putting your hand in there by participating and providing input is just as important or even more important than voting for the mayor and your councillor. That TMP is the current manifesto derived from that process, so I doubt we are going to get any optional rail for Stage 3 beyond the red lines on that map, we likely won't ever get Carling at all.

The best scenario for Bank and Montreal Road is to push for Transit Priority measures as suggested on the light blue lines on that map. Maybe run super frequent buses (like every 5 to 10 minutes) — if that proves to live up to or surpass capacity, only then would it warrant looking into it as a tramway or subway corridor. The idea needs data and a business case before you can drop billions on it.

[Truenorth00]

Between Stage 1 and Stage 2, three levels of government will have spent approximately $7 billion to build 56 km of LRT. The idea that they'd agree to spent almost the same amount on 16-20 km of subway is pretty unfathomable. They city can say whatever it wants, but there's no business case for subways on Bank and Rideau-Montreal. Will never be enough ridership to justify it, especially for higher levels of government. And especially when that same $7 billion could build LRT to Kanata and Barrhaven, twin and electrify Trillium, build the connection to Gatinueau, build the Carling LRT and the Baseline-Heron-Walkley BRT. People need to understand opportunity cost and the improtance of ridership. In summary, $7 billion would practically pay for their ultimate network as planned today, or just the subways on Bank and Montreal-Rideau with nothing else.

[c_speed3108]

My suspicion is that after phase 2 we may not see any more mega project "phase x" extensions. I think we are more likely to see smaller projects. This is mainly due to the fact that they would be relying on upper levels of government for most of the funding.

Maybe an extension of the confederation line to Eagleson and/or Fallowfield to get it to the park and ride lots.

Maybe the Trillium line of the bridge to Hull. Perhaps some limited double tracking at the pinch points.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by c_speed3108

My suspicion is that after phase 2 we may not see any more mega project "phase x" extensions. I think we are more likely to see smaller projects. This is mainly due to the fact that they would be relying on upper levels of government for most of the funding.

Maybe an extension of the confederation line to Eagleson and/or Fallowfield to get it to the park and ride lots.

Maybe the Trillium line of the bridge to Hull. Perhaps some limited double tracking at the pinch points.

Yep. I think it'll be more piecemeal.

And we're getting to the point where the easy and cheap stuff (per km) is done. We're also getting to the point of diminishing returns on ridership for the expansions at the edges. For example, going south of Baseline from Algonquin is challenging. Getting to Fallowfield won't be cheap. And won't garner substantial increases in ridership since you're just moving Barrhaven's transfer point from Algonquin to Fallowfield. So something like that may be a stage/phase by itself.

[roger1818]

Originally Posted by Gat-Train

A Rideau-Montreal subway is the priority, given that they scrapped the bus lanes. Hard to justify a Bank Street subway to Queen's park with the Trillium line a few kilometres to the west tho. The suburbs have gotten rail, time to focus on low-income urban transit.

One could equally say it is hard to justify a Rideau-Montreal subway with the Confederation line a few kilometers to the south.

The reality is neither Bank nor Montreal road currently have the density to support a subway on their own and the suburbs beyond them will be served by rail with an alternate route.

Originally Posted by gjhall

Sure, but luckily the city is beginning the process of a new Official Plan.

True, but they just announced that they are investing big bucks to upgrade the Trillium Line. Do you think they will immediately turn around and say that won't be good enough and propose a Bank St. subway before Stage 2 is even finished? Not likely.

The current improvements to the Trillium line are supposed to meet demand for the next 30 years. Once it gets close to reaching capacity, a decision will need to be made how best to resolve those capacity issues, and a "Bank St. subway" would be one option worth considering at that time.

[lrt's friend]

I can't imagine prioritizing BRT on Heron and Walkley over doing something meaningful on Bank Street.

If we can get BRT on Baseline and Carling, we have accomplished a lot, and then get the Confederation Line to the other side of the Greenbelt towards Kanata and Barrhaven.

[lrt's friend]

One could equally say it is hard to justify a Rideau-Montreal subway with the Confederation line a few kilometers to the south.

The reality is neither Bank nor Montreal road currently have the density to support a subway on their own and the suburbs beyond them will be served by rail with an alternate route.

I see this as more an Eglinton cross-town project, partly underground and partly at grade. In both cases, it is not just about density along the route but also providing service to a suburban hinterland. In the case of the Montreal route, it could easily extended on the South Orleans corridor that has been set aside for rapid transit. I would hate to see us embark on building busways again.

Furthermore, they would be city building projects, rejuvenating both the Bank Street and Montreal Road corridors, which offer many intensification possibilities. We cannot achieve density based around narrow streets and buses in mixed traffic. A subway would allow towers to be built on those corridors.

I don't see this as Phase 3 but down the road, we need to consider bringing rail to key urban corridors. This has been part of the objections to the enormous cost of the Confederation Line which so greatly favours suburban commuters over urban residents. Isn't that what this board is advocating? Living close to downtown or in urban neighbourhoods? But then we disagree with offering transportation to allow this to happen.

[roger1818]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Yep. I think it'll be more piecemeal.

And we're getting to the point where the easy and cheap stuff (per km) is done. We're also getting to the point of diminishing returns on ridership for the expansions at the edges. For example, going south of Baseline from Algonquin is challenging. Getting to Fallowfield won't be cheap. And won't garner substantial increases in ridership since you're just moving Barrhaven's transfer point from Algonquin to Fallowfield. So something like that may be a stage/phase by itself.

At $710 million, the extension from Moodie to Terry Fox will also be "easy and cheap." It is about 6.4km, so works out to approximately $110 million / km and includes 3 stations. The cost per km skyrockets for extending beyond Terry Fox though.

The extension to Barrhaven will be much more expensive, but with the plans to grade separate the VIA Rail crossings, there are opportunities to save money by combining the two projects.

[Kitchissippi]

One of the interesting things to watch for is how the NCC's masterplan for Confederation Heights develops. Other than Tunney's Pasture, this site is slated to become a major employment node for the Federal government outside the downtown core and it sits on a transit nexus where improvements can be very effective, like fully double-tracking between Carleton and Greenboro. This was vaguely hinted at yesterday in council.

It will require a massive coordinated effort of reconfiguring/replacing some of the bridges and the spaghetti loops of roads, but I think this area integrated with Billings Bridge, the RA Centre, Vincent Massey Park and Carleton U has great potential in the future. A better integrated Trillium Line, SE Transitway and Baseline BRT would be key to achieving this. Because the Federal government has a huge stake in this, it's something they could easily be convinced to put money into.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

I can't imagine prioritizing BRT on Heron and Walkley over doing something meaningful on Bank Street.

I totally ageree that the Bank St. corridor is crying out for something, but in terms of the layout of the area you'd be working with, I can't see anything else but an underground system being feasible.

[JohnnyRenton]

I think for Phase 3 there are really only two projects that are a given at this point; the extension from Moodie to Terry Fox, and from Algonquin to Fallowfield. At this point, those are the last segments needed to complete the core C-Line network.

Beyond that, I think that the best thing the city could do is stop, take a deep breath, and really think about how to push the transit network forward, at a lower cost. There is no getting around the cost of the C-Line, if the city wants to do it right. And that is fine. But there is only so long those kinds of massive, engineering intensive projects can go on, especially as they get pushed out further into low density suburbs.

I think some things that could be investigated are:

- Single track extensions for some of the suburban stretches (such as Fallowfield to Marketplace where a single track providing 10 minute frequencies could be sufficient for that market).
- Battery powered MUs. Mostly thinking about the single track sections but this would allow extensions to avoid the cost of electrification, while still using electric trains that could use the DT tunnel. Obviously there is a cost associated with having infrastructure to support charging point and/or constant charging, but it is worth finding out how much cost savings could be in that option.
- Stop planning extensions to Gatineau without a proper, integrated, interprovincial transit plan. The two agencies, and to a certain degree the NCC, need to work together so the networks can be properly leveraged for cross border travel.
- There is a list of "rethink" opportunities when it comes to LRT in Kanata and environs, the Trillium Line, and the SE Transitway.

Those are just a few that I thought of right now. And really, everything is going to come back to the issue of costs. Projects need to start getting more affordable.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

You (and I) are among the minority who think that central neighbourhoods should receive better service. Both Bank Street and Montreal Road have plenty of opportunities for intensification and renewal.

---Waving frantically---

And remember: the current Montreal Road project takes improved surface transit for that corridor off the table, forever.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Kitchissippi

You guys can dream about a Bank Street-Montreal Road subway all you want but it does not appear in the official TMP. The plan would have to be revised before anyone can even consider it. How long did it take to make the last iteration? The only cleared path for Stage 3 is the current "Ultimate Network"

This would be the same Transportation "Master" "Plan" that called for dedicated bus lanes the full length of Montreal Road, which were scrapped, without a whimper, less than two years later, to satisfy the cycle lobby.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by gjhall

Sure, but luckily the city is beginning the process of a new Official Plan.

Which won't do anything for the Montreal-Rideau corridor where bike lanes have already destroyed any possibility of meaningful improvement to transit on the surface.

It's pokey buses all the way down.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by roger1818

One could equally say it is hard to justify a Rideau-Montreal subway with the Confederation line a few kilometers to the south.

The reality is neither Bank nor Montreal road currently have the density to support a subway on their own and the suburbs beyond them will be served by rail with an alternate route.

More broadly, you don't have to always build subways under streets themselves. This is often done to cut costs in North America, where streets are linear. But it's not a hard requirement. And that North American perspective is what is driving this obsession with subways under those avenues. Get away from looking at only the street and you start to see the need for a North-South corridor (Trillium Line) and East-West corridor (Confederation Line). This is where the planners are coming from.

Both Montreal-Rideau and Bank are fixable with surface transit. Just needs some tough choices to be made (giving up road space).

And on ridership levels, like it or not, what's happening in Toronto is setting a marker for funding grade separation. If you can't get peak ridership to > 10 000 pphpd in a given corridor, the likelihood of getting funding from Queen's Park and the feds for grade separation is low. Just look at the drama over the Scarborough subway. And the Scarborough RT has higher ridership today than we'll ever see on Bank and Rideau-Montreal in our lifetimes.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Both Montreal-Rideau and Bank are fixable with surface transit. Just needs some tough choices to be made (giving up road space).

There's the rub: road space will never be given up in Ottawa, at least not on anything less than three-lanes-both-directions.

So, we've taken higher-order transit solutions off the table for the urban area; we've taken lower-order transit solutions off the table for the urban area; and all we are left with is slow buses in mixed traffic with congestion issues that there is likewise no political will to solve (because it would offend suburban automobilists), but with the urban-area property taxpayer still paying their pro-rata share to extend LRT and BRT further and further out into the suburbs.

This is not a recipe for an urban success story. It's setting in motion a century of urban decline.

[lrt's friend]

Both Montreal-Rideau and Bank are fixable with surface transit. Just needs some tough choices to be made (giving up road space).

Not possible if we use road space for bicycle tracks.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

There's the rub: road space will never be given up in Ottawa, at least not on anything less than three-lanes-both-directions.

So, we've taken higher-order transit solutions off the table for the urban area; we've taken lower-order transit solutions off the table for the urban area; and all we are left with is slow buses in mixed traffic with congestion issues that there is likewise no political will to solve (because it would offend suburban automobilists), but with the urban-area property taxpayer still paying their pro-rata share to extend LRT and BRT further and further out into the suburbs.

This is not a recipe for an urban success story. It's setting in motion a century of urban decline.

I am going to have to agree and I am a suburbanite.

We want to satisfy the bicycle lobby and I am fine with that as long as we can find a way to satisfy the other 95% as well.

We can't close off Montreal Road or Bank Street as these are key roads for all traffic.

So if we need to allow regular traffic and we want bicycle tracks, at some point we need to bite the bullet and run transit underground.

This may be 20, 30 or 50 years down the road, but I don't see an alternative.

If the Confederation Line is as successful as everybody hopes, we will eventually need to siphon traffic onto a parallel line. Likewise, when we hit the Trillium Line wall, we need a parallel route and sending it directly downtown is the answer.

Calgary and Edmonton will have 3 downtown connected rail lines within 10 years or so. Ottawa cannot live with just one in the long-term especially with a stronger transit culture than Calgary or Edmonton .

We cannot think of plans for the long-term future in terms of today's needs. We have to assume that we do things right and ridership will grow, hopefully faster than the population.

We are going to have to think at least 15 years into the future, because that is the time that will be required to plan and build a subway and likely that will need to be done in multiple phases, so maybe even 30 years. Again, this will be about tomorrow's needs, not today's.

When Ottawa-Gatineau is approaching 2,000,000 population, the Confederation Line will not be enough.