Lemieux Island area (iv)

At the south (Ottawa) end of the Prince of Wales railway bridge over the Ottawa River, the City has installed large gates & fences to keep peds and cyclists from using the bridge as a shortcut to Gatineau.

Thwarted peds have kicked down the fence, whose posts were bolted into concrete, etc etc.

There is a security guard on the Gatineau side, 24/7. If someone crosses the bridge, he points out the fence is there to keep people off because it is dangerous to use the bridge. So he sends the ped or cyclist back to the Ottawa side. There is a certain logic in this.

Would it be too logical to notice the obvious: there is a strong desire by peds and cyclists to use this bridge to join Ottawa and Gatineau. *  Rather than a fence, how about installing a deck and repairing the cable railing, and actually let people use the bridge. Imagine, an interprovincial bridge without cars! Naw, couldn't be done.



*Even Mr Greber called for it to link the Airport Parkway via a road through Carleton to the Champagne Parkway to the bridge to Fairy Lake Parkway to the Gatineau. We hopefully will never get such a road ... but a cycle path would be useful.

Interprovincial Transit Link

Earlier this week, the NCC held a public open house on proposals for improving interprovincial transit. I blogged on my general preferences (a LRT link using the Prince of Wales  bridge) a few days ago, http://westsideaction.blogspot.com/2010/07/interprovincial-transit-opportunity-to.html. 

At the meeting, a number of matters came up that caused me to ponder.

Bridge repairs... the cost of the LRT on the loop was much much higher than that of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). I inquired as to why the order of magnitude numbers for LRT were so much higher since both were surface crossings. Well, to use the Chaudiere, Alexandra, or Prince of Wales bridges, massive rebuilding would be "required" of these older structures. This rebuilding cost was added to the LRT cost.

But wouldn't these repairs and rebuildings still be required if there was no LRT and the bridges continued to be used by cars and buses like they are today? Yup, I was told, they would require the same rebuilding, at the same costs.

So why do the planners add the reconstruction cost into the LRT option cost when it is a cost that has to be met anyway, even if LRT is not built? The bridge repair costs are not unique to choosing the LRT option. [hint: by adding bridge rebuilding costs, costs might be divided three ways - city, province, feds - instead of remaining 100% to the bridge owner. Nice try for shared dollars, but it makes LRT scarily expensive when the bridge cost will be paid whether we stick with roads or go with whatever form of transit we choose].

Something similar comes up for the Preston Extension. Preston is to be extended out meet the intersection of Vimy Place in front of the War Museum. This road link will be built early in the DOTT process so cars can avoid construction on Booth. After LRT is running, motorists continue to benefit from having a new four lane road built across the Flats. Surely this cost should be stuck in the road budget, but no, its put into the LRT construction budget.

DOTT Capacity: In the many DOTT meetings I have attended over the past years, the consultants always use passenger forecasts that INCLUDE ALL THE STO passengers in the tunnel. They do not assume there is any STO bus service left through the downtown.

There are several options for Quebec links if the linkage is by LRT. One is for Quebec-bound residents to go into downtown Ottawa subway stations and take an LRT to Bayview, and then transfer to a separate LRT service to Gatineau. If their destination was other than downtown Gatineau, they would then need to transfer again to bus service.

The other option was for a separate Gatineau-bound LRT train to run through the downtown tunnel, across the Flats, and then over to Gatineau, making the whole interprovincial trip in the same vehicle. This is a more attractive option than having to transfer LRT trains, and ties in nicely I thought with the design of the Bayview Station which allows trains leaving the downtown to go west  or north/south without transfers, ie same car service from the downtown to airport, or downtown to Baseline. I was really surprised then to hear some of the experts at the event declare that the tunnel would be full to capacity with OC Transpo LRT trains and there simply would not be room for Gatineau-bound trains unless another tunnel was bored just for the "loop" service.

While I confess to some scepticism about this advice, I do wonder if the DOTT planning team is planning their station designs so that someday a third or fourth track could be added to the two originally planned, ie, keep the same stations and escalators and mezannines but increase the carrying capacity by adding additional tracks.

Bus noise: I am concerned to see some of the interprovincial transit options including running way more STO buses through the downtown than before. Way to go ... Ottawa residents will pay to go deep underground while Quebecers inherit the streets. Result: despite the reputed superior fashion-sense of Quebecers, there would be no net improvement to the street environment.

And, the NCC evaluation criteria did not seem to consider the noise of BRT on adjacent residents or quality of life in downtown neighborhoods. Traffic noise is a big factor for downtown residents, it is bizarre to be planning for major increases in bus use without even mentioning the noise and dirt and deteriorated quality of life that would engender.

Almost as bad, and taking some sort of prize for short-term thinking, was the suggestion to run STO buses across the Prince of Wales bridge to a transfer station on the Flats at Bayview. It was a mistake made decades ago to convert the Alexandra bridge from rail to car, and now we are looking at mega-bucks to convert it back ... why on earth would we do the same mistake to the POW knowing that in 20 to 30 years we would be converting it back to rail?

Finally, a comment on how we treat transit users. A certain percentage of users have limited transportation choices, due to income constraints. They'll take the bus because they don't have a {second, third} car. They are captive. They will suffer through buses that get caught in traffic. Or are routed into giant ditches, while motorists get millions of dollars spent to have "scenic" routes into the core.

But if we want transit to be a viable, lifetime option for individuals who do not have cars (the young, elderly, lower income, students, enviro-nuts, etc) or who can choose to drive but don't, or if the city wants to shift modal split onto transit to avoid building ever more roads, then it has to offer attractive amenities to induce the ridership that has a choice.*

 For the downtown loop, I love the idea of the LRT taking the Prince of Wales bridge because it offers great views to riders; and if the other part of the loop used the surface of the Alexandra bridge (which was designed and built, like the POW, as a railway bridge) then there would be even greater views. Imagine, taking the loop would be a scenic, attractive activity bringing sensory pleasure to the ridership. It would even induce tourist traffic just because it would be so nice. Sane tourists going to big cities use transit and avoid bringing their private car downtown -- or does Ottawa want to remain small-town with acres of its core dedicated to storing automobiles?

If transit is to be a viable competitor to surface roads and private cars, then it can't always be shoved onto the least-attractive corridors or into ditches. As far as I know, LRT trains won't shrivel up in the sunlight, passengers won't morph into zombies if they have a nice view. Maybe the comatose cubicle farm inhabitants snoozing in their LRT trains will wake up with some of that famous NCC landscaping.



*[I kinda like the Ottawa River Parkway routing option for the west LRT just for that reason: it gives transit users a first class view. And it might even do that by bumping two lanes of the Ottawa River Commuter Expressway off the waterfront.]

Interprovincial transit opportunity to choose your mode

Prince of Wales rail bridge from Ottawa to Gatineau

Tuesday from 5.30 to 8.30 at City Hall (main floor) there will be a public display of the options for interprovincial transit between Ottawa and Gatineau.

Options include which mode of transit to use: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) or LRT. Route options include connections via the Alexandra Bridge (or under it, in a tunnel under the river, and remember the tunnel under downtown Ottawa is already very deep down so this doesn't require a steep slope, and the Rideau station has been designed with this connection in mind); a west connection on the Prince of Wales Bridge or Chaudiere Bridge; and maybe connecting these two crossings to make a loop.

Mode: Ottawa is growing out of its BRT system and converting it to an LRT system including a downtown tunnel. Gatineau, smaller than Ottawa, is just building its Rapibus BRT which will last it 30 years until it too is converted to a LRT.

It just doesn't seem logical to me to opt for a BRT linking the two cities. The idea behind the tunnel is get the buses off the downtown streets (so the streets can be redeveloped and landscaped for pedestrians and cyclists), and this means getting the STO buses off the streets too.

And we don't want large BRT stations at LeBreton Flats or near the National Gallery to transfer passengers to the LRT. So, my choice for the mode is LRT for the loop. In Gatineau's small downtown, it is probably premature to run the LRT in a tunnel; I suggest it would be fine to run it on the surface for the next several decades where it would serve to animate the street life.

Route: in the west, either the Chaudiere crossing or the Prince of Wales Bridge will work. But since the LRT route will help intensify development, it makes the most sense to me to run it on the POW bridge so it services all of  LeBreton-Bayview redevelopment areas, and connects with the future North/South line along the O-Train corridor (which might extend right over to Gatineau on the POW). While a bit further than the Chaudiere, the POW bridge would be car-free so service would be faster. The already-planned Bayview Station has been designed to handle east-west and north-south traffic and all its transfers, permeatations and combinations.

I also don't think they would need to double track the Prince of Wales bridge at the beginning, five or seven minute scheduling should be possible even with a single track bridge. Indeed, it might be possible to initially run the whole loop only in one direction on one track, and later expand it to two ways on two tracks.

On the east side, it intrigues me that the LRT could run on the old Alexandra Bridge rather than in a tunnel under it. Of course, car traffic would be booted off, and the bridge would revert to its original rail function. It is sort of poetic justice that rail structures were converted to roads in the 50's and 60's and now they could be converted to LRT service*. And the views from the LRT would be fantastic from both bridges, which can be a great feature attracting ridership.

City hall is air conditioned, so its a great time to come down and tell the City and NCC what you want to see for the interprovincial transit connection.

If you can't get there, you can go to this web site and make your comments. If you are really lazy, you can just copy and paste the shortcut to this blog posting: www.http://interprovincial-transit-strategy.ca/

*expanding on this idea of converting rails to roads and back to rails, the parkway along the canal would be a great conversion back to surface LRT (streetcar service) which would include Lansdowne Park, the Glebe, Main Street, Ottawa South, to Billings.

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?

DOTT plans affect west side residents (vii): Bayview Rapibus Station?

The City has been evaluating the structural soundness of the historic Prince of Wales Railway Bridge over the Ottawa River to Gatineau. The City bought it a number of years ago for transit.

Friends of the OTrain and  LRT transit proponents have long viewed the POW bridge as a great solution for taking transit across the River. The interprovincial transit study offered renewed hopes for extending LRT service from downtown Ottawa to Gatineau over the POW as the first phase of a loop system serving the two downtown employment centres and to alleviate bridge congestion. Alas, logic may be loosing out to other concerns.

I gather that a leading proposal for addressing interprovincial transit woes is to widen the POW bridge to a two lane transitway (not LRT or OTrain) to bring the Rapibus system (Quebec's new bus rapid transit system just like Ottawa's 25 year old transitway) over to the Ottawa shores. A transfer station and bus storage area would be constructed under the new Bayview Station, connected by elevators to our E-W LRT line. The Rapibus terminal would be in place until such time as LRT was extended across the River. Of course, building a new terminal and widening the bridge * will work to delay that day by at least a quarter century.

 I dislike the idea of building a bus parking lot on valuable LeBreton and Bayview Yards development lands. Extending the LRT across the river and having it service a transfer station on the Gatineau side and having a terminal station at Place de la Chaudiere makes more long-term sense to me. The interchange at Bayview would then be much smaller, more efficent, and technologically advanced. Has the interprovincial study really gone so far "off the tracks" and gotten stuck in bus mode?

* I hear rumors to the effect that the existing POW bridge is in really bad shape, and may only be worth the scrap value of its steel, and that to extend either bus transitway or LRT service from Gatineau will require a totally new bridge. In any case, double tracking it, converting/widening it to two way bus way, or building a new bridge altogether will be very expensive. Mind, a bike and pedestrian link along the bridge would make for a wonderful new link in the bike network.

Light Rail and the SW (OTrain) route

I am constantly amazed at what I hear about light rail planning in the City.

I have to conclude it doesn't matter what happens, people will simple reinterpret it (twist it) to fit their own preconceived agenda. It is part of the hyper-partisan-ization of our society that I find distressing.

There was a SW transit plan under Mayor Chiarelli. It ran on street surface in the downtown, accross the Flats and Dalhousie neighborhoods,  and turned south at Bayswater, ran along the OTrain line, managed to miss the airport, to Riverside,  to the new Strandherd Bridge over the Rideau and thence into Barrhaven where it ended.

The plan had a number of merits. It put transit into a rapidly growing area at the same time as the population moved in, which meant people could get used to transit from day 1, and the street plan could be shaped to feed to it. It serviced a lot of underused lands en route to Riverside. It did not go to Kanata or Orleans, because those areas already had the transitway. It was to cost well less than a billion dollars.

Voters turned it down. Some because it was too expensive. Some because it wasn't expensive enough: they wanted a tunnel. Others wanted it to go East-West first, even though most of the new LRT would simply replace existing BRT. Thus was born an unwiedly coalition of nay-sayers who voted to delay the SW - LRT til a later point in building out the LRT transit system.

After the election, the east-west route took priority. To appease those who did not want surface rail in the downtown, it was put in a tunnel. Even if the LRT could run on the surface for a while, it wasn't a good long term solution, which the tunnel is. Those who claimed the SW - LRT was too expensive gladly voted for the more expensive tunnel version. Converting the BRT transitway to LRT was seen as progressive, even if it didn't give a huge boost to ridership. From a strategic point of view, these Council decisions are defensible.

Along comes the recession and government stimulus money. Stimulus money isn't to be spent far in the future if it is to stimulate us out of a recession, it needs to be spent soon (unless you are US Congress which will announce the majority of their stimulus money next June, before their re-election, and well after the recession is over). The stimulus in Canada requires municipalities to accelerate or bring foreward planned projects so that they can be implemented sooner than otherwise planned and stimulate the economy. This means projects that are already in the planning pipeline. They are not to be the projects the City planned to build this year anyway - that wouldn't be a stimulus, it would just replace municipal money with federal money. Ottawa has two transit plans with environmental approvals: the E-W  LRT from Blair to Tunney's, and the SW - LRT from Bayview south.

The City is suggesting it could build the segment from Bayview to Riverside immediately. This is NOT the old SW plan that included the street surface tracks in the downtown. It does not include the link to Barrhaven. It builds on elements from the old SW plan, which Council has previously decided needs to be built someday, and offers it up for immediate funding. This is smart politics. If other levels of government are waving money around, rejiggle City transit projects timelines around a bit to take advantage of the free - or at least cheap - money.

Let's not forget other elements of the transit route nirvana. The NCC, Gatineau, and Ottawa are examining a better linkage of interprovincial transit. The most logical first-phase outcome, in my opinion, would be a LRT service from Rideau through the new tunnel to Bayview Station and thence north accross the Prince Of Wales Bridge to Gatineau. Say goodbye to most of those blue buses in downtown Ottawa, and hello to a busier LRT system. The converted OTrain alignment looks pretty prescient in this case.

Take a valium Ottawa, the unfolding LRT plans are not to everyone's liking, never will be. But they are certainly not a disaster.

[Note that the extension of the LRT from Tunney's west to Lincoln Fields is not eligible for short-term stimulus money because the route hasn't been decided on yet. There is still lots of consultation and hand-wringing to do].

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.

Royal Mis-treatment

The Prince of Wales railway bridge is owned by the City of Ottawa. Built in the 1880's it should be declared a heritage structure. It sits unused just north of Bayview O-Train station.

Does the city have any maintenance plan for the bridge, or are they going to let it rust away until it collapses or requires more expensive repair? I do not know if the rust is just a surface effect to not worry about or if it is corroding away the bridge. But I do notice that other city steel structures are rust free. Just north of this bridge is the Lemieux Island bridge, pristine and rust free. While cycling around I tried to find other steel bridges that are owned by the City, but could not find a rusty one.

So, does the City have an asset maintenance program or not?

Interprovincial Transit Ideas

I attended a few hours of the interprovincial transit study meeting last Thursday. I heard lots of suggestions for improving interprovincial transit experience. Here are some of them:

1. Use the Prince of Wales Bridge. This rail bridge from Bayview Station to Gatineau is a favorite solution to most problems. Many felt it need not be double tracked right away, but could operate for the first years as a single track with passing tracks at each end and maybe at Lemieux Island.

2. Most attendees want a rail solution (LRT or O-Train) not a bus solution or bus on transitway solution; and certainly scorned bus lanes as a very inadequate solution.

3. Note that when the Ottawa LRT goes to Baseline, and if it goes to Gatineau on the POW bridge, that Ottawa U, Algonquin, and UQH (or is it UQG?) will be on the line. Carleton will directly connect on the O-Train. It is logical to assume institutions of higher education will be high transit users, because students are supposed to be poor, professors are supposed to have higher levels of environmental consciousness, and transit could be habit forming for life.

4. The City owns the POW bridge, but has not done any maintenance on it yet. It is deteriorating before our eyes. Will it get used before it rusts away? Where is the City's maintenance plan for this valuable asset?

5. Building a separate right of way transit system also creates additional capacity on surface roads. For example, removing the downtown bus lanes when the tunnel opens, means a 25-50% increase in road capacity for cars. This is seldom mentioned - shouldn't motorists in their single occupancy cars be delighted to get rid of the buses? And willing to pay for this improvement?

6. Reducing capacity: we tend to build transit as an incremental addition of service. We also continue to build roads that compete with transit. If we think in terms of "modal shift", we could put trains on the POW and then cut commuters off their abuse of Booth St as a through-way.

Preston St is one of the few examples in this City of major decommissioning of a road. It should never have been widened to four lanes, they have never been used, and now the road is being rebuilt as two lanes with the former lanes being converted to wider sidewalks and on-street parking bays. Parts of unused Gladstone east of Bronson were also narrowed a few years ago.

7. Convert roads: The Alexandra (interprovincial bridge) was a rail bridge for more than half a century. Then it has been a road bridge. Why not run the LRT accross the river on the bridge (it would have the wide pedestrian/cylist boardwalk, and two rail lines) and loop it around Hull via Allumete and the Rapidbus right of way to the POW bridge to Bayview and back downtown. In short, why do roads have to be sacred? Maybe we need to sacrifice some road pavement for transit. Note, we wouldn't have all the parking problems these commuters cause either.

8. Other conversions projects include: Colonel By Drive could be converted back to rail. The western parkway from Dominion Ave to Lincoln Fields could be reduced from a 4lane commuter road (we call it a parkway, but lets face it, its primary use is a commuter throughway for motorists) to a two lane road, and the southern two lanes converted to the rail tracks for the LRT. No additional green space would be consumed.

9. Why do transit users get put underground and motorists get the street surface and river views? Would a transit service with nice scenery attract more users?

10. some people think the NCC favours a tight, fairly small circle route for transit, sort of like the ceremonial route. This would put LRT on the surface or under the Portage Bridge. Many attendees want a large ring, that intercepts some traffic before it gets downtown (why make everyone transfer downtown?), and so like the POW and another crossing at McDonald-Cartier. A few wanted an even wider ring, that went as far west as Island Park, south past Carleton U, and as far east as Rockcliffe.

11. Go under water. The canal is shallow, and could easily be opened up and a LRT line burried a few feet down, then the canal refilled. Stations would double as canal crossings. Suddenly transit would open up a whole new urban environment that cars cannot access.

A few years ago I suggested during the OMB hearings on King Edward that the simplest solution was to take the McDonald-Cartier off ramps and run them down under the Rideau River and Stanley Park (a very shallow cut and cover operation...) and dump the vehicles onto the Vanier "Parkway". Of course, the Vanier was originally supposed to be heavy truck route but short-sighted councils appeased neighbors by forbidding trucks and thus dooming King Edward and Rideau St to decades of misery.

12. OC transpo and STO run in separate silos. For example, they lack a common route planner, amongst other fare problems. One of the meeting attendees said that OC and STO would have a joint planner up later this year. Yeah!

13. Faith in Big Government. Many participants at the meeting had a charming faith that if only some big government agency would take control, they would surely built this person's pet project. Didn't that big government give us half a century of vacant land in LeBreton Flats? The Qway to Kanata? The expanded 416 and 417 that extends the commuting shed a hundred km further out, so that small towns turn into large suburbs with obviously short-sighted planning?

I am much less certain that more government is the answer. Although only the NCC does large scale and longer time line planning, the City is hopelessly shortsighted and captive to the current modal split and land use model.

Alarmingly, a number of meeting proponents thought it wise to extend O-Train service to Arnprior, to Wakefield, to Montebello, to Smith's Falls or Cornwall. Do we really need to subsidize or encourage exurban development?

14. Replace buses vs service new areas debate. Some attendees wanted to convert existing bus transitways to LRT, and avoid building new transitways in favor of LRT (eg east end transitway, the rapidbus project in Gatineau).

Others thought the best thing was to leave the bus rapid transit in place and convert existing rail lines to LRT, opening up underdeveloped areas of the City, in new planned developments that focus on LRT transit.

I think particularly of Citizen columnists and bloggers on that one. They opposed the southwest LRT because it didn't serve the major population centres in the east-west axis. They oppose the new E-W LRT because it wont add ridership, just shift users off buses. My view was we should build new transit first, for example the southwest transitway, and try to force development along the huge underdeveloped brownlands along the line.

14. The sucess of the O-train. Is it a conspiracy or not? The City avoids mentioning the O-Train like the plague. Yet a demo project, derrided as going from nowhere to nowhere, grandiously projected to carry 7,000 people a day by 2020, carries today over 10,000 passengers a day. Why isn't the frequency being increased (this doesn't require more trains or track)? Why isn't it being extended to Gatineau where it would offer the fastest interprovincial commuting? Why aren't we going to run it into the DOTT ? ( I am not sure if the trains are diesel electric, in which case they would need only a overhead connector, or if they would have to be converted to run on both diesel and electric tracks). The more I hang around the people at transit meetings the more I tend to sympathize that there just may be a conspiracy after all...

15. Cycling. Will the new rail and transit rights of way really have useful cycling and walking facilities along them? We know that nice drawings always show these facilities when the transit project is being sold to the public, but with details missing. Unfortunately, when built, key links in the cycling and walking plans have been removed due to "budgetary constraints", or are charmingly left to built in segments as adjacent lands are developed (what? a bike path built in segments ... surely we should be grateful for disconnected bits). A number of meeting attendees emphasized that the rights of way should include proper bike and walking facilities carefully designed in to maximize their utility. Token bike pavement is so "out".

Summary: lots of ideas. Many of them good and positive. Much approval of LRT, much scorn for busways as yesterday's solution. Not many of the ideas will see fruition.

Inter-Provincial transit study - some observations

I went to the Open House held Thursday about the interprovincial transit study. The study should identify problems with transit going between the two cities, user problems, and suggest solutions. I signed up for a round-table exercise. It was the first one I think I have attended, and it wasn't as bad as I feared.

First, the moderators at each table were well informed and not too rigorous about keeping the participants on topic. This was important, because the topics, defined beforehand by the sponsors, were very narrow. Basically, they were looking for expressions of what the problems were.

In contrast, most of the participants were selling something: their transit solutions. I recognized a number of the participants. General public? Not really: they were, like me, transit and planning hobbyists/activists/proponents of their pet projects.

This open house, like a number of other ones I have attended, are not really broad public consultations because the attendees are self-selected (ie, already interested in the subject) or nominated by their councillors (mine checked to make sure I was going...). I think this is why the final plans that come out of some of these planning sessions and public consultation sessions generate opposition later on ... because the general public wasn't really there.

For example, a number of the people at the interprovincial meeting were the same ones I see at the DOTT meetings. I have sat on the Preston Streetscaping project for 16 years, and only now that concrete is being poured that some residents pop up saying "What?". Similarly, after all the public open houses, suddenly some are questioning the basics of the DOTT.

I don't know what the solution is. People cannot go to every meeting on every subject, there are too many meetings, on too fuzzy objectives, on projects that too often die on the vine. On the other hand, it is frustrating to go thru a multi-year process and then have people pop up at the last minute objecting to everything and wanting to start all over with a different project. LeBreton Flats planning process is an ideal example. Even though dozens of meeting have been held and the city and NCC established a final build-out plan --- politicians, citizens, newspapermen, want to throw it all out and introduce something new, like a soccer stadium. For the DOTT plan, many of the critics question decisions made a year ago, eg council says it will be a tunnel, not a surface system. So DOTT produces a tunnel options, wieghs them, and recommends one ... at which point whiners start advocating for a totally different system to solve other problems.

This interprovincial study might find something useful from the public consultation process. Or it might just be a routine gone through to say the public was consulted, to pacify the civilian planning hobbyists.