The Booth Street station is location directly under the new elevated Booth Street overpass. The overpass crosses over the station and the aquaduct. The new LRT alignment is a few meters south of the current transitway which is closer to the aquaduct. Most frightening about this drawing is the abundance of car traffic lanes on Booth, the awful manoevering required to get buses from the Booth St bus stop over to the centre lane to turn onto Albert to go uptown, and the generous addition of lanes to Albert Street in both directions. Somehow, a transit project is providing lots of expensive car commuter infrastructure and generous road widenings on prime downtown development land. Just who will rush to live in condos facing such over-sexed roadways? What happened to neighborhood connectivity, with these proposed huge automotive rips to the urban fabric of Dalhousie neighborhood.
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Thanks for the tireless blogging Eric. I hope you do Hurdman soon, I hear a rumour that the proposed design is such that the Southeast Transitway will be orphaned and never converted to rail.
ReplyDeletecheers.
Sorry, I wont be doing Hurdman. This is WESTsideAction. I try to focus on the neighborhoods I know, since the impacts are often dependent on choices not made, alternatives not followed, etc and of the EastSide I know little. My blog covered downtown west station to Tunneys, with a detour to Campus since there is great potential to improve access to the Golden Triangle. I have opinions on other stations, but they are not my turf, I will leave those to other people to comment.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading,
Eric
Oh, yes, for Hurdman, LRT will be on raised embankment to the immediate north of the current transitway station, with NO PROVISION for connecting to the SE transitway - even more so, the choices being made PRECLUDE ever having a LRT go SE or Alta Vista from Hurdman. The city has apparently made the decision that the SE transitway is to remain buses only; any extension of LRT service south will be via the OTrain alignment, ie the SW LRT line. Personally, I think it was possible to design a new Hurdman station that kept S options open for future conversion decisions. Maybe our children will pay hefty sums to undo the Hurdman design, should the gasoline age come to an end.
ReplyDeleteEric, again and again I see you bemoaning the widening of Albert, and Booth north of Albert, and in this post again you talk about "automotive rips" in the community, but the fact is there is no community north of Albert. There is one lonely condo building, and a museum. Widening Albert and Booth to the North has no impact on the present neighbourhood, as people only cross Albert to get to the transitway.
ReplyDeleteLebreton Flats to the North are not even on the NCC's radar, so I doubt they'll get developed to the point of being any kind of neighbourhood in the next 30 or so years.
Matt: widening Booth and Albert has lots of impacts. They are being developed as wide straight streets, which means faster moving vehicles and lots more of them. We are catering to single-occupancy vehicles. It is the antithesis of community building. What sort of streetscape will result from storefronts on the east side of Booth separated from storefronts on the west side by 4 lanes of traffic plus 2 parking lanes (easily convertible later into traffic lanes, like the ones in front of the war museum can be)? Wider streets make longer, more dangerous pedestrian crossings. In short, LeBreton is looking more and more to me like a bunch of condo buildings surrounded by freeways. Ottawa and NCC are killing the urban community they should be building up.
ReplyDelete-Eric
"Hurdman, LRT will be on raised embankment to the immediate north of the current transitway station, with NO PROVISION for connecting to the SE transitway - even more so, the choices being made PRECLUDE ever having a LRT go SE or Alta Vista from Hurdman."
ReplyDeleteThanks Eric, that’s what I was afraid of. I know that it’s not your area of expertise (I’m a Westsider now but I grew up a stone’s throw from the Southeast Transitway, I remember when it was built and I once used it frequently), but honestly, what an unbelievably stupid and shortsighted decision, from a City renowned for stupid and shortsighted decisions! The area along the SE Transitway from Bank St (Billings Bridge) to Walkley has lots of intensification opportunities, and ditto the Alta Vista Transit Corridor (the corridor could easily be developed as a traditional main street with condos/stacked towns and ground floor commercial the whole way and make Alta Vista the next Westboro -> it’s the same distance from downtown, with nice big houses/lots and a few clusters of apartment towers, old trees and parks, and lots of transit users: perfect right?!). Good grief, I would not have expected to find myself sitting here 3 years on wondering if this time we *really* need to ‘push the reset button’…
the corridor could easily be developed as a traditional main street with condos/stacked towns and ground floor commercial the whole way and make Alta Vista the next Westboro -- gee, you took my urban planning fantasy right out of my playbook. Streetcar/ bikepath oriented, no aterial road, intensification, it is so easy to do although the dog walkers would loose their space and those with backyards on the greenspace would object like hell. But to me "finger infill" makes a lot of sense. Eastboro?
ReplyDelete-Eric>
Makes sense to me too. Maybe something in the water or the air at Place de Ville C leads to increased production of great ideas destined to be ignored?
ReplyDeleteCheers!
PS "Eastboro" already belongs to this (shudder): http://www.ashcrofthomes.ca/communities/details.aspx?listingid=25