Read article here.
I was reading about the new transit plan for Ottawa and how the city will transform in the next decade.
The plan is to have a light rail system running from the Blair Road station along the existing transitway, into downtown through a subway system and then back out on the other side until Baseline Road. Bus services would connect to the light rail option and it’s unknown if they would still have buses running directly into downtown from the suburbs anymore. That was not mentioned but I’m sure with a little digging, I could find the proposed plan on the City of Ottawa website.
What are my preliminary thoughts on this?
Bravo to whoever thought about the solution to getting rid of the gridlock that exists now in the downtown core. I spend 30 minutes on the bus in which 15 of them are usually spent in the last seven kilometers of my 25 kilometer trip. The downtown core is a crawl in rush hour. An underground subway would accommodate a lot of people. Would this accommodate everyone? Stay tuned for my personal thoughts on that.
No bravos go to the fact that they aren’t even considering extending the light rail options out into the suburbs. Now, someone can correct me here as I am no expert on this subject matter. But doesn’t most of the population of people working downtown live out in the suburbs? Barrhaven, Orleans, Kanata…it’s all areas where the housing is a little more affordable than downtown. Also, isn’t the reason that the Queensway is stuffed to the gills every morning and afternoon due to the fact that all the suburbs have a bunch of cars filling the highway up because to some people, taking the transit system isn’t time-effective? I’m sure there are other reasons for taking your car to work, but let’s just run with that train of thought for a moment. Isn’t the big deal of a light rail system to grab people from the outskirts of the city and to bring them into the city? I would imagine that if I lived closer to downtown, I would either bike, or take a bus into downtown. I don’t think I would make my way to the light rail system. A bus from Vanier would probably take me the same amount of time to get to the light rail system and zoom into downtown. I’m sure there’s a lot of things I’m not thinking about, but any way I look at it, I thought that the light rail system would be reminiscent of the GO-Train in Toronto where the train caters to the areas OUTSIDE the city of Toronto to bring them easily into the city. This system doesn’t seem to be doing that (but on the other hand, I suppose you still need to catch a bus to get to the GO Station in Oshawa) and we’ll all be stuck on a bus now anyhow.
So here’s the rub. How will this new system work for yours truly? If we keep in mind that I work on the Quebec side of the downtown area, I can envision that I would either:
A) Still have one sweet bus ride to the Quebec side.
Or (More likely)
B) have to take a bus to Blair Road. Get onto the light rail. Get off the light rail when I hit downtown. Find a bus that takes me over to Quebec.
I would like to think that they’ll still keep one express bus running to the Quebec side. For those heading downtown, it’s still an inconvenience to switch at a connecting station to get onto the light rail system. But they probably get there faster in the grand scheme of things…or do they? We all know how connecting routes sometimes leave us standing there for minutes.
Thoughts on the proposed transit plan? There you have my thoughts in a nutshell; yay to the subway tunnel through downtown, nay to the fact that the light rail won’t extend to the edges of the city.