I am a geographer, a teacher and an International Consultant based here in Ottawa, Canada.
I am a resident of #16 or “River Ward” in Ottawa, Canada . For the past three years I was the
President of the Carlington Community Association which is in the north end of this ward. This blog will be used to discuss municipal issues in the City of Ottawa and the National Capital Region.
The Blog was created on June 6, 2010 and it will evolve as more people join the discussion.
Thank you.
Michael Kostiuk.
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Light rail can be run on Ottawa’s downtown streets during peak and off peak hours.
Light rail can be run on Ottawa’s downtown streets during peak and off peak hours and be able to meet or exceed the city of Ottawa’s Transit ridership requirements.
The problem is that Ottawa does not seem to be able to learn from the experience of other cities.
And most of that information is FREELY available.
For example in Toronto the “slow, high floor, narrow door, articulated streetcar” that operates on Queen Street in MIXED TRAFFIC carries far more people per hour than the Sheppard subway line. The problem with the design of the Sheppard subway is that many people feel that it does not go anywhere. (You can imagine what many people will think of the DOTT that only goes as far as Tunney’s pasture?).
To justify the construction and operation of a subway it also needs to carry large numbers of people OUTSIDE of the peak period, or it is a wasted investment.
Please take a look at downtown Ottawa outside of the peak morning and afternoon period and tell me if a subway is a good investment!
Both Albert and Slater streets are occupied by only light volumes of transit outside the peak periods.
Would we run empty LRT cars at a high frequency of service in our proposed DOTT subway during off peak hours?
How cost effective is the DOTT outside of peak hours from Monday to Friday?
And on Weekends…?
So back to Toronto: at peak times the busiest of its streetcar lines (e.g. King Street or Queen Street streetcar) have carried up to 10,000 people per hour in peak service. The Sheppard subway line built at cost of over $1 billion has a peak ridership of about 3500 per hour/per direction. An interesting and quite revealing statistic is that while Toronto’s streetcars occupy only four percent of the surface route in kilometres, they carry 22 percent of all weekday passenger traffic. (As well, when a Toronto bus route reaches 3000 riders per peak hour, it becomes eligible for conversion to a Streetcar service).
I am not advocating a Toronto style streetcar system for Ottawa’s transit network, but rather to show how even a streetcar that operates in traffic has a very high carrying capacity
What I am saying is that you must then be able to understand that a low-floor Light Rail train which has many WIDE doors, and which is also operating in its own dedicated lane will easily be able to carry FAR more people than a Toronto streetcar that operates “IN” traffic.
When operated on city streets light rail trains are usually limited by the length of the city blocks, which usually translates to four 180-passenger vehicles (720 passengers). If operated on 2-minute headways using specialized traffic control signals, a well-designed two-track system can handle up to 30 trains per hour per track. This combination of frequency and train length would support peak rates of over 20,000 passengers per hour in each direction. More advanced systems with separate rights-of-way can support peak ridership rates of over 25,000 passengers per hour per track. In the future if Calgary goes to 5 car light rail trains it will be able to carry 30,000 passengers per hour (Source: Calgary Transit).
Ottawa’s downtown core is very small, even tiny compared to Toronto so there is no reason why surface Light Rail cannot operate across several blocks of streets here in Ottawa. This is not a big distance, so the need for a tunnel provides only minimal time advantages, but it also removes the transit service from public view.
Having streetcars and light rail on the streets is in itself an incentive to ride them,
–> “just because they are there”.
Why do you think there are so many Tim Horton’s and McDonald’s around the city?
Its “visual in your face” marketing.
The power of on-surface rail is that it is “SEEN” by people, as opposed to a system that is hidden from public view.
Consider Ottawa’s own O-Train.
It operates mainly in a trench or in a secluded corridor, and consequently many people in Ottawa have not even seen it.
Imagine how many people would see it, AND would want to ride it, if it was used to move transit users across the Prince of Wales Bridge into Quebec (and vice versa)?
But, meanwhile we have designed a transit system in Ottawa that requires most transit users to go through downtown. That is fine if you have an older style city where all of the employment is in the core, but that is not the case with Ottawa or many other Canadian cities.
So people who do not live in the core and do not work in the core, will not want to go through the core to get to their destinations. Meanwhile, there are the unused east-west railways lines in Ottawa, which are NOT being used for transit.
So many cost effective solutions are NOT being chosen for Ottawa.
The question is why?
Didn’t anyone read the Mayor’s task force recommendation on public transit for Ottawa?
But since we are in a municipal election year these transit issues MUST be discussed openly and honestly.
Michael Kostiuk, candidate for River Ward. June 17, 2010.
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