Unknown offence

There's a big hubabaloo in the Centre of the Universe (tm) about arrests without cause (just being in Toronto should have been enough cause for criminal prosecution).

Here in Ottawa, we have our own cryptic crimes (tm)  -- see sign above along the "virtual LRT line" (as bus rapid transit is now being rebranded in some cities).  What is the offence? The fine is known, and it indicates the city has its revenue enhancement priorities straight. Safety considerations seem to have been let fade away, however.

Somerset, old and new

This photo is from the 1950's, looking west along Somerset. The road rises up on the viaduct to cross the CPR tracks. Lots of industrial land uses are visible in the distance. The residences in the foreground have abundant tree shade and shelter from the "busy" street. The Plant Pool is out of sight on the immediate left of the picture.

A matter of Choice ...

Shown below is the Queensway, typical autumn mid-afternoon volume.

Shown below, the transitway. I gather that the transitway carries the same volume of passengers each year as does the Qway. Which one would you rather have cutting through your neighborhood?

Look again at the land take of the Qway, smell the fumes!

Yup, I think I prefer the transitway. And I will even more appreciate when it is converted to electric LRT service. The city is going to grow ... do we bitch forever about the cost of transit and continue to ignore the 10-20x larger expenditure on roads for commuters, or do we opt for transit?

Rapid Transit in the 1950's

This photo is taken on Somerset Street in front of the Plant Pool, looking east up the hill into the heart of the Little Italy district which is now Chinatown.

Preston runs left - right across the photo. The Rainbow grill on the corner of Preston and Somerset is now May's Chinese restaurant. The Atlas tire billboard is now Frisby tires. The buildings on the far left corner of the intersection houses Azar Signs amongst other businesses. The buildings burned down in the late 60's I think. At that time, my elderly Italian neighbor once told me, one of them housed a topless shoeshine parlour, which were popular venues back then. Further up the hill, beyond the Atlas sign, was the Vendome bar, which became a strip club and All Star Hotel before it burned down.

I note that the streets do not have a painted centre line, stop lines, crosswalks...

The lamppost in the right foreground is a streetcar rail on end. It was removed only about 10 or 12 years ago when the posts were moved back behind the sidewalk. All of the traffic control signals and signs are mounted on telephone poles, none had their own posts that so clutter or enivronment today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbqoBnhiak4 is a link to a short movie that shows the streetcars moving around this intersection at minute 7.35. There are shots at 4.20 and 6.10 showing the streetcars on Elm street leaving the Champagne Streetcar Barn.

Transit Stations ... What will we get? ...

Detroit's downtown city bus station

This photo is of a new centre-island transit station in Detroit. Detroit is not the most viable city in the USA. We're not Flint ... nor Detroit. Will Ottawa's LRT system get anything as nice?

It has a tensile fabric outdoor shelter at the bus loading platforms and there is also a elevated people-mover station platform. The air conditioned and heated glass waiting room building is 25,000 sq ft, includes washrooms, ticketing, and shops. The whole thing cost $22 million dollars, and opened in June 09.

And here's the kicker: the entire terminal complex serves about 12,000 passengers a day -- which is about the same as the OTrain station at Bayview. Could anyone say our bus-shelter collection at these points is better than Detroit's?

Proposed Bayview station; click to enlarge

Thus far in the DOTT - LRT process all the outdoor (non-tunnel) stations have looked the same because the project team has a local-architect-on-board who has sketched in the stations. I presumed that the station architects were there to ensure the functional aspects of station design - pedestrian flow, access points, ensure there is enough space for an elevator well, escalator well, etc.

But at the last few DOTT meetings I recall that the stations have been described in much more definite terms: Tunney's station will look like this; this is what Bayview will look like, etc. I am wondering if the conceptual space planning is turning into a fait accompli?

What happened to the notion that LRT stations should reflect individual neighborhood identities (existing or proposed)? Do other LRT systems have uniform station design system-wide (like we did for the transitway) or unique stations?

Are unique stations reserved for politically and economically powerful neighborhoods whilst lower income neighborhoods or unorganized communities get off-the-shelf stations-from-a-kit?

Where is the we need a world-wide design competition crowd -- have they gone away because no stations are planned for the Glebe? Are Ottawa's transit stations going to be sole-sourced to the planning bureaucrats or the winning bidder architectural firm on the project planning level?

Proposed Tunney's bus centre-island transfer station and LRT station. No soaring roofs ... but soaring isn't usually associated with government office complexes. In the City of Ottawa, only taxes soar.

Read more about Detroit's station at http://www.metropolismag.com/lists/lt.php?id=eU0DAQUFUQFZUxoIAUwADgICAA%3D%3D

Transit Tunnel is no Turkey

The usual suspects are carping about the transit tunnel, again. Did the province provide funding? Apparently no good news is good enough -- they didn't provide 15-25% more than was asked for ... so it's disaster time. Ring-a-ling. Ding-a-ling. It's disaster time in the city ...

So what might happen if the tunnel portion was cancelled? Critics are quick to attach huge price tags to the tunnel portion. But these won't disappear if the tunnel is cancelled. After all the tunnel includes tracks (won't these be needed for the surface rail?); it includes stations and platforms (which will be needed at the surface too, and may have to be located on what is now private property that may have to be acquired by the city); signalling (which will be way more complex and expensive on the surface as it will have to accomodate private cars, trucks, and bus movements too), etc.

Surface rail brings its own unique costs too - streets will have to be dug up for years beforehand to relocate all access hatches (wo/manholes) outside of the track right of way, etc. Anyone visiting Toronto knows how slow the streetcars are and what chaos results in repairs to utilities crossing streetcar tracks or repairing the tracks themselves.

The last numbers I saw showed that cancelling the tunnel in favour of surface rail would result in a construction saving of about $300 million.

However, the system would suffer severe traffic flow impairment when it snows, or the streets are congested, or some bozo from upper lower Pointe Gatineau decides to block the track in order to squeeze through the intersection on his yellow light ....

And this doesn't even count the delays caused every day by north-south streets having a regular green light (which means the surface rail track is closed to train movements 60% of the time so the north-south motorist enjoys its green-yellow cycle). Let's throw in some Tamils or other protestors ... or striking civil servants who every few years close down the transitway by picketing at Place de Ville and a few other key spots that "accidentally" block the transitway.

What surface rail gets us in the downtown is a vulnerable transit system. Reliable it won't be. It will be  a very expensive rapid transit emulation system, aka a streetcar pretending to be a rapid transit system.

Transit committee received estimates that going for a surface rail option will, on a daily basis, result in sufficient impairment of service that a number of additional trainsets and operators will be required. How many? Well I saw estimates/calculations of about $100 million dollars per year of capital and operating cost for the additional equipment. [ Readers should see the comments received on this blog, which contest the dollars, time period and payback period for the operating savings. Once I receive the transit committee submission I'll post it on the blog ]  The "savings" in not building a tunnel would be eaten up  ...  by increased costs of surface rail in the core.

We can spend the money to build a tunnel that gives us a fast, reliable service in all weathers. Or we can spend the money operating a congested, grid-locked surface streetcar system. I know which one I choose.

For more on this same subject, including the source doucment, go to : http://westsideaction.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-turkey-talk-on-tunnel.html. Indeed, readers might want to scan several other entries in the last few weeks on the tunnel and station design.

Future of No 3 bus route

The City is busy paring back bus services. Residents in the Preston area are probably glad to get back to having the No 3 on Preston again. And in the spring, the bus stops will again have shelters, benches, and trees for shade.

Once the bus transitway is converted to LRT service (sheduled for 2017 or so) then the no 3 bus route will follow Preston to Albert to Booth Street and the LeBreton LRT station, then over to Gatineau. It will no longer go to downtown Ottawa. Riders on the north-south routes will be taken to rapid transit stations where they will transfer to the LRT vehicles for the east-west portion of the trip.

Transit woes worse than Ottawa ?

Metropolis Magazine has a short article about how badly Las Vegas botched its monorail system. Burried in the article the careful listener might hear some warning sounds about the joys of un-amalgamated cities or urban planning districts that fail to include major sectors (who knew the Las Vegas strip is not part of Las Vegas City and is in fact unincorporated?).

The double-decker buses on the strip are a success though. I last rode them a few years ago, and there were crowds of people at every stop. Most of them had never ridden a bus in their adult lives, and fumbled the fare cards, etc. Frquently overheard comments were "hadn't been on a bus since 7th grade" or "seats aren't as nice as my Lincoln". The buses are similar the one that Ottawa is test driving on the 94 route. Perhaps because of the novelty, the strip bus is a big success; the off-strip monorail (refurbished Disney older-generation trains, I think) is not.

Metropolis concludes that Vegas is now looking  for " a ride from the Strip to downtown via a “train-emulation system.” While this sounds even more 21st century than a monorail, it’s more commonly known as “bus rapid transit,” planningspeak for a bus with a dedicated lane and sophisticated stops that work like transit stations."

Keep in mind that the Strip is crowded with people who by and large are visitors, and thus millions do not have their own cars with them. All urban planning lessons from Vegas come with huge caveats because of its unusual economics. What works in Vegas stays in Vegas.

http://www.metropolismag.com/lists/lt.php?id=eU0DDgAGUgdWXBoIAkwADgICAA%3D%3D

NCC to Quebecers: Back [on the] Bus

 

Proposed modernist Bayview LRT station is elevated and long. The proposed STO bus terminal would be off the left. Click to enlarge photo.

Planning in a Federal capital region is not just about good planning on utilitarian "planning' terms. A good chunk of it is political planning and symbolism too.

In the past,  separatist elements in Quebec made hay from the disparate images of the Quebec side of the river (low rise, lower income housing, industrial mills) and the Ottawa side of the river (shiny high rises set high on a green hill). They drew a direct line to the federal purse, discrimination, second class status, etc.

The response from the Feds was politically / symbolically motivated. The Portage Bridge appeared, the Ottawa River Parkway was rerouted so that Wellington appeared to go directly to Hull while Ontario users had to "turn" to continue in Ontario. High rise cubicle farms sprouted on the Quebec side. Museums and prestige buildings materialized. Confederation Boulevard.

The major planning decisions for roads, transit, and buildings, in the Ottawa-Gatineau area have traditionally had a strong Federal political element.

Today, I fear the Feds are about to step in la merde in a rather big way.

Ottawa planned and built its transitway (bus rapid transit, or BRT) a few decades ago. It was a reasonable decision for the size of the city as it was then. It was always designed to be convertible to LRT, which is where we are heading now. On the Quebec side, the City is now planning and constructing its own BRT system called Rapibus. I presume that Gatineau is making a rational decision given its population density, geographic area, costs, etc.

The problem comes in the downtown area where the two systems -- LRT and BRT -- will meet.

There is currently a front-running proposal in the NCC-chaired interprovincial transit study to bring the Rapibus system over to a terminal in Ottawa. If the Prince of Wales railway bridge is rebuilt as a two-lane BRT for STO buses (a repeat of the Alexandra Bridge solution adopted almost half a century ago) the national unity optics are terrible: English commuters ride sleek and shiny LRTs to the downtown, French commuters ride old-technology diesel buses to the periphery where they are then permitted to transfer to the LRT.

Election 2020: If I were the PQ, I'd be snapping pictures of the two modes from an aerial point over the Ottawa River looking south, ie the view from Quebec. It would show the Federally-funded bright red trains entering the modern very long elevated glass and steel Bayview Station, and Quebecers shuffling past bus shelters on their traipse through wind-whipped snow to get to first class transit.

Of course, the national unity side could score with a slightly different system: build the LRT line over the POW bridge to stop at Terrace de la Chaud and then run along the surface of Rue Principale to Place du Portage. Then the picture shows Federal money delivering the smart-growth green technology of the future to the voters of Quebec. I'd even paint the LRT vehicles on the first part of this great circle loop in STO colours, regardless of who operated them.

Which picture will the NCC be setting up?

Goodbye Baseline Station

The old Baseline transitway station has been retired, replaced by one immediately to the west. The old location will become the site of new building with the transitway underneath it. The glazing was removed from the station shelters and the steel is being scrapped. The shelters are 25+ years old and not worth relocating.

Demolition of the concrete central structure at the station.

Steel and concrete and asphalt are separated for recyling.

The new station has side platforms rather than a centre-island design. A regular user of the station told me this morning that she much prefers the new side platforms, as being simpler to navigate.

Playing with Bus Shelters

Bus shelters can quickly become background items we seldom notice. A few years ago, I noticed some advertising firms converted a whole shelter into an advert, or built a roof structure that totally modified the appearance of the shelter.
-

Around Ottawa, we have seen the Casino de Lac Lemy ads that convert a glass shelter into a Carribean-looking poker hut.
-

I enjoyed this shelter, in Toronto, with fake frost on the windows and snow on the roof. It's part of a beer campagin to complete the phrase "colder than..."

LRT Maintenance Facility Site

There will be a low-key public meeting at City Hall on Wedn. June 24 from 5.30 to 8pm on the proposed new maintenace facility. No speaches, just poster boards and comment sheets.

Recall that on May 27 Council approved the alignment (route) and station locations. The consultants and staff are now working on station design, the BRT to LRT conversion process, construction staging, and how the LRT and BRT will operate once the line opens. Their results will be shown at another open house in Sept.

But back to the Maintenance Facility. Planners examined all the site along or near the LRT phase one alignment from Tunneys to Blair. The three top sites are
1. St Laurent, south of the Qway, either on PWGSC lands or immediately west of the current OC Transpo yards
2. Bayview, between Bayview Ave, Scott/Albert to the south, the Ottawa River Parkway to the north, and the existing bus marshalling facility to the east (Bayview Station)
3. Hurdman North, the vacant land immediately north of Hurdman Station

The consultants showed some familiar google satellite images or air photos of existing facilities in Mineapolis, Houston, and San Jose. Unfortunately, none of those are of the type proposed for Ottawa. Due to our extreme climate (minus 50 in winter, plus 32 in summer with high hummidity) most of the Ottawa facility will be indoors. The maintenance facility itself would of course be a large indoor structure. The storage yards would also be a structure, perhaps partially heated, to protect the vehicle fleet from weather. There would also be some test track sections, lots of loops and switches to move vehicles around, and a huge employee parking lot. These are most likely to be outdoors. So there is abundant oportunity for the facility to a noise nusience to residential neighbours, which is why the consultants prefer an industrial or already-noisy area.

The Bayview site is currently vacant brownfields, former snowdump and garbage infilling of Nepean Bay. Running through the site is the east-west transitway and the north-south OTrain line, the presence of which will complicate building a yard. Especially worrysome is the link across the Prince of Wales Bridge to Gatineau, which cuts the site in half. I would hate to see this potential interprovincial link 'lost' because the LRT itself used up the approach space to the bridge.

There is an existing Community Development Plan for the site. It calls for high rise apartment towers about 75m tall (23 stories, approx). Unfortunately, the City elected to build the high rises east of the Larouche Park, on unstable land that requires massive cleanup. The CDP plan deliberately scorned any consideration of economics, which would have put the residential uses on the land now used by Larouche Park and moved the park east one block to be adjacent the riverfront parklands. Now, apparently, the CDP is stalled because the proposed developments are too expensive to build due to remediation costs. And the City may well lose a potentially large and viable residential neighborhood close to the transit, the core, and employment centres, in favour of a one or two storey high sprawling industrial building and outdoor trackage because to build that does not require remediating the lands: just lay down a meter or two of stone excavated from the tunnel under the core, and presto, industrial heaven.

Now I can envision that a facility could be built there that would be compatible with adjacent neighborhoods and able to develop the site to a higher potential. Such a facility would locate the buildings and test tracks then fill in the loops and empty spaces with apartment buildings on top of a large podium structure that would be the green roof covering the maintenance facility, etc. Note that buildings would not be built over the maintenance garage itself or storage tracks, just all the other less-critical tracks and parking lots. Such a facility should have minimal neighorhood impact as all the facility would be indoors and quiet. The biggest impact would be workers commuting to the buildings, but that should be a similar traffic volume to the proposed CDP which would have had a dozen or more tall apartment towers.

But while architects, planners, and dreamers can envision such a development, I have absolutely zero faith that the City could or would actually built it. Until they come up with a plan that shows a largely indoor facility, with apartment towers above, and no gross underutilization of the site for "surface parking" or squealing train loops, it's thumbs down from me for this site.

Greenroof Example - Pl de Ville

One of Ottawa's older multipurpose developments has a lovely green roof on its south side. This roof is above what was for 30 or so years a shopping mall, but for the last years has been federal government office space. The pond adds an unexpected water element to the downtown, as does the fairly large bright green lawn. It is highly visible, located adjacent to one of the busiest downtown transitway stops at Place de Ville. The glass pyramid lets light into the office area below. It suggests the pyramid glass structure at the Louvre in Paris, but on a way smaller scale. It does not figure in any Dan Brown novels, yet.

Bayview Station - What's It For?

The Bayview Station isn't part of the original bus transitway; it didn't exist until 2001. It was built because the experimental O-Train service, using the existing rail tracks, needed a transfer point for passengers. From day 1, city planners assumed it was only a transfer station from buses to train. Little or no walk in traffic was expected. Yet anyone frequenting the station notices a continual stream of people walking into the Station. They come from the office and industrial buildings on City Centre Avenue, the residential areas to the southeast and southwest. They have worn paths accross the fields to make their own direct access to the station. All these paths are indicators of how badly the planners misjudged the neighborhood demand for the station.

A few years back, the city was planning for the now-temporarily-abandonned North/South LRT route that would have gone from the downtown to Bayview and then south to Riverside and Barrhaven. They planned to simply close up the Bayview Station for several years during construction, because the O-Train would not be running. I challenged them to notice the walk in traffic; and demanded they measure the pedestrian volumes to have a factual basis whether to keep the station open or not. No surveys were done, but the plans were soon revised to keep Bayview open for neighborhood access.

Now I am seeing some of the same attitudes as the DOTT team works out options for the Bayview Station complex. Their team bias, as I see it, is for a T-shaped station. The north-south vehicles (whether O-Trains or LRTs) would pull into the same spot as the current O-Train platform, and users would ascend to a upper level platform station where the transitway is now. Possibly, the N/S train service could be extended accross the Prince of Wales railway bridge to Gatineau. (Historic trivia: when built this was the longest bridge in the British Empire).

On paper this is a nice simple T-shaped station. But that choice carries a lot of ramifications for future rapid transit in Ottawa. To start, it means that there will be no continuous same-car LRT service between the downtown, its hotels, and convention centre, to the airport. Say goodbye to many large conventions as a result. Or maybe wave to them over in Hull, for if the Gatineau end of the LRT is extended along the existing rights of way, the Casino (and its convention centre) will have the one-car no-transfer direct-to-airport service.

It also means the future west side LRT network will consist of discrete lines with transfer stations. A future Carling Avenue LRT line for example, would also terminate at Bayview, and users would require another transfer. Commuters from Barrhaven would take a bus to the south LRT, transfer, LRT to Bayview, transfer, LRT to downtown. Despite all these transfer stations currently planned to be indoor heated facilities, I won't be surprised when some of them end up being bus shelters out in a field somewhere.

About the only quantifiable benefit the DOTT team can come up to justify a T-station is that it takes less land then the alternative layout, termed the Direct option. The alternative permits the N/S trains to continue to the south or north accross the POW bridge. AND it would permit trains from the downtown to turn onto either the southbound line towards the airport and Riverside or onto a northbound line over the POW bridge to Gatineau.

I much prefer this second option. It permits both Ottawa and Gatineau to have direct airport access. This alone may be the carrot that gets Gatineau on-board the LRT system. It gives commuters a whole new interprovincial bridge, with no congestion. It means passengers from the downtown won't have to transfer when they want to go south to Riverside or west on Carling, but will pick up their train from any downtown transit station. This direct-to-all-directions layout is much more flexible and well worth the minor additional land use, especially since the additional land take is in the "hole" under the Albert Street and transitway bridges.

The possiblity of direct service to Gatineau means that the first part of a soon-to-be-studied downtown-to-downtown interprovincial loop could be open at the same time the first phase of the Ottawa LRT opens, in 2017. We could replace most of those STO buses on downtown Ottawa streets with LRT service from the downtown to LeBreton to Bayview to Gatineau via the existing POW bridge. It wouldn't be a full loop at first, just a half loop, but it would deliver significant service improvements to interprovincial travel.

The DOTT planners don't seem to get excited by these possibilities. They seem to be still married to the idea that Bayview is merely a transfer station. Certainly, it is in an isolated location, rather like Hurdman. But when LeBreton Flats is eventually built out to the eastern edge of the Bayview Station, when the Bayview yards is developed as currently planned with a dozen highrises, if Phoenix developments gets their two high condo towers on the south side of the Station, and if City Centre is ever redeveloped into 2,000,000 sq ft of office and residential use (as is currently approved), then the Bayview Station will be the centre of a very busy, very dense catchment area.

The DOTT planners are fond of saying they are building a system for the next 100 years. I don't yet see them acting as if the west side of the core will be anything but empty fields. Perhaps they need to get their architects to sketch out the Bayview area incorporating the Phoenix, Bayview Yards, City Centre, and LeBreton proposed developments to drive home just how important this station location is.

DOTT - Tunney's Pasture Transfer Station

DOTT refers to the Downtown Ottawa Transit Tunnel project. I sit on the public advisory committee, with a particular interest in the LRT project from Bronson to Tunney's. Under the current plan, Tunney's will be the main place for bus users from the west to transfer to the LRT trains which will run roughly along the current transitway alignment to Bayview, LeBreton, and the downtown. Eventually the LRT train service will be extended further west to Lincoln Fields.

The City has come up with two concepts for how the bus users will transfer to the LRT trains. Keep in mind the size of this operation: we are looking at a station as big and busy as Hurdman, Lincoln Fields, or Baseline. Thousands of buses will arrive at Tunney's every day, discharge or pick up passengers, and after a time stop, cycle again back to the western suburbs. The station will be in use for a number of years, maybe decades. Both plans have the buses come up out of the transitway cut on the north side of the station (there is an existing exit ramp there).

Concept one is termed the Parallel alignment, with a Hurdman style station located to the north of the transitway; the Linear option circles the buses around to put some of the stops along Scott Street.

My preference is for a Parallel station design, ie north of the transitway. The volume of buses will be huge, and in place for an undetermined number of years or decades. In Ottawa, and for transit plans, ‘temporary’ can often turn into ‘forever’. It is important to get the buses off the street and into a contained area away from cycle and pedestrian traffic. Noise barriers and landscaping is also possible if the bus lay-by areas are off Scott Street. This will be a major transfer station; we do not see any other major stations such as Baseline, Hurdman, or Lincoln Fields built on the shoulder of a busy road with adjacent residential land uses.