Pie Palace

On Monday I went to the City’s open house on the Lansdowne Live plan. It was a zoo. Concerned Glebe-ites singing protest songs; people asking passersby to sign petitions against the “sole-sourcing” of the plan; and people handing out leaflets telling the truth about the deal.

Inside, it didn’t get much better. Tiny posters in small font, replicating the text of the City’s Lansdowne Live website. Each poster was surrounded by a crowd three or four people deep trying to read what was on display. There were officials from the city and/or the developer, but they were too inundated with people for me to get close to them.

It was insanity.

I went there to find out what was proposed, and ended up with more questions than answers:

What happens if the CFL team folds? The Ottawa Renegades lasted only four seasons. Aside from the $300k in annual rent[1], where would the team’s failure leave the city? According to the business plan, the CFL team is supposed to contribute $42 million dollars back to the city and developers.[2] That seems like an awfully large risk in a $200 million plan.

How will people get there? The transit portion of the slides seems optimistic. Lansdowne is far from the transit way, far from the planned LRT, and far from the nearest highway on-ramp. During peak use, the plan suggests that people will park and ride from the burbs to get to Lansdowne. That seems optimistic. Bank street becomes terribly congested for anything larger than a 67s game (eg, the Ex). Without a change in infrastructure, that seems unlikely to improve.

What about public use? The City of Ottawa is short on centrally located sports fields. There doesn’t appear to be an allocation of land for amateur sports such as soccer and ultimate. The plan would see a “front yard” that would serve as parking for large events. There’s no mention of use for amateur sports.[3] It sounds like they’d keep the winter bubble over the field at Frank Clair stadium, but that’s about it. Even though the pictures show fountains and a plaza, but I couldn’t find any mention of those in the posters or business plans.

What about the extras? The first phase of the plan is replacing the stadium and asphalt parking lot with something a little nicer and adding retail to the site. Phase 2 is the development of hotel, residential, and office components. The plan doesn’t describe what those developments will be. How large will each retail space be? What is the 41,000 square foot “unique food store“? Since the site is far from major arteries, it seems unlikely that a big box store would move in there. What will happen if the space can’t be rented out?

Aside from these questions, I have to say that the event didn’t feel like a consultation. It felt like something verging on a coronation, or perhaps a revolt. The vocal members of the crowd clearly didn’t like what they saw. The city and the promoters did little to answer visitor’s questions – although there was a Q&A session at Wednesday night’s consultation.

After reading the City/promoter’s docs I’m left with the simple conclusion: even though the Lansdowne Live proposal is no worse than what’s currently at the site, it doesn’t have much going for it. The proposal envisions Lansdowne as an attraction, but without the necessary transit to get visitors to the site. It lacks public space: no statuary, no gardens, no playing fields, no plazas, no skate parks, no amphitheater. Nothing.

[1] – Business plan, page 20.
[2] – Business plan, page 23.
[3] – Take a look at the stadium page and search for “winter”.

Against the recommendations of the Pie Palace legal staff, I am going to continue my habit of posting while tipsy. You have been warned.

Earlier this week, Public Transit in Ottawa ran a post about the proposed downtown tunnel in Ottawa’s new rail-based transit network, which implied that a downtown tunnel is both necessary and that there are no other options.¹

We have many, many options for transit: we could put dedicated transit routes down Carling, under the Canal, or along Wellington, which would solve downtown congestion without having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building and maintaining a tunnel. Similarly, we aren’t tied to the (diesel) rail solution that the city is proposing: we could use buses or electric streetcars. If we wanted to solve downtown congestion without spending hundreds of millions of dollars, we could close downtown (north of Laurier, say) to private vehicles during rush hour and set the traffic lights to a permanent east/west green.²

Simply put: we have options. But that is not how the transit debate is being framed. On the left, we have city councilor Clive Doucet saying that world class cities need rail transit. On the right, we have a mayor saying that Ottawa needs a tunnel. Neither of those things are true. I think it would be awesome if we had a rail network, and I think a downtown tunnel would be nifty, but we don’t need either of those things. We could solve our transit woes more cheaply, and maybe even more efficiently with other options.

I would argue that our quasi-debate is obscuring the larger issue: Ottawa’s burbs are built for cars, and no amount of dedicated transit will be useful to suburbanites. Until we increase suburban density to a point where it’s economical to lay track (or dig tunnels) out to Nepean, Orleans, and Barhaven, public transit will continue to be an expensive and unattractive way to move most of Ottawa’s population.

The four possibilities proposed by city staff in March of 2008 were essentially the same, differing only in where the train would leave off and pick up with buses. Now we’re being told that we can’t do without a downtown tunnel, again, without anything approaching the level of deliberation and consideration necessary before dropping hundreds of millions of dollars.

Happily, the City of Ottawa is revisiting the Comprehensive Five Year Plan that decides how our city should grow during the next half decade (and will be having public consultations at Ben Franklin place later this month). It remains to be seen whether city councilors and staff will use this opportunity to address the root cause of our problems, or will continue addressing the symptoms.

1. Peter, of Public Transit in Ottawa, posted a comment apologizing for his editorializing. Props to Peter. (back)
2. Please note that these solutions are just a few possibilities. They aren’t necessarily great, and I don’t endorse one over another. I’m just pointing out that there are other possibilities that haven’t been publicly floated. (back)

The Citizen reported on Kitchissippi Councillor Christine Leadman’s new transit proposal yesterday. Ms. Leadman repeated Clive Doucet’s proposal: with the eastern train heading down Carling, instead of following the Parkway.

Interestingly, Nancy Schepers (city manager for planning, transit and the environment) says that her department didn’t seriously consider Carling as one of the potential routes the train could follow. Which isn’t surprisingly, considering that the four plans were essentially identical. Ms. Schepers also says that the Carling route would be “far more expensive” than the parkway route – which is odd, given that we haven’t seen a detailed cost analysis of the parkway route yet.

It’s a pity that this proposal didn’t go anywhere, because Carling has many of the attributes that make mass transit work: it’s surrounded by housing, and it has existing “destinations” along the route (Carlingwood mall, various medical centres, and a mix of stores). The Parkway is an easy route to follow since there isn’t any development there, but that’s precisely why it makes a lousy transit corridor.

Update: I forgot to credit the photo author. The photograph was taken by paulshannon.

Blake Batson has said on his blog that he wants to “float ideas on how to improve our system that others will be free to vet or claim them as their own.” In that spirit, I’d like to present my first suggestion for our pals in the City of Ottawa: intensification.

Our city was supposed to be squeezed into the Greenbelt. But since this 60s, development has occurred outside the Greenbelt and our city has been surrounded by a fluffy pink tutu of sprawl. Looking at a Statistics Canada map of population density around Ottawa, we see that the population per square kilometre is mostly in the 500-2999 person range. Only in the core does the population rise beyond 5000 ppl/km². Worryingly, looking at the population change map between 2001 and 2006, we see that the population outside the Greenbelt is growing quickly, while the population in the no man’s land between exurbia and downtown is shrinking.

Given the received wisdom that city services (water delivery, sewage disposal, transit) work best in dense urban areas, Ottawa should be looking to the orange areas on that map to lower their cost per taxpayer.

Happily, I’m not the only person suggesting this. The transit experts hired by the city to evaluate our transit plan said the same thing: our suburbs need higher densities to make rail transit a viable option. In a surprising moment of lucidity, the city’s own transportation committee endorsed the idea of improving density along the new light rail route.

Our current transportation plan isn’t very different from what we have today. Hopefully, if City council can keep focused on building a more urban city, we can look at a much better transit scenario in 2031.

Thanks to Blake Batson for the idea of this series.

So what would make a good transit plan? I’m not an urban planner, but I can make a few ill-informed guesses:

1. The plan shouldn’t be based on streeters that ask people what they think of their current transit system – that model is too easily biased. Instead, they should do a survey of where people actually go. Ask them for their home and work/school addresses, for example. Build a map that shows where people go and when, then build transit to service their needs, not what you think they may want.
2. The plan shouldn’t just have a “vision”, it should also explain how the goal will be met. The existing plan states that they want to see 30% – in 2001, it was around 16%¹, but they provide no indication of how those goals will be achieved.
3. Include city growth as part of the plan. Ottawa is all crawling with new condos downtown and new subdivisions in the ‘burbs. The plan should serve existing population centres and plan for new growth.
4. The transit plan should include zoning amendments to encourage growth and in-fill around transit lines. The old 2020 plan alluded to that, but the new napkin sketch doesn’t even raise the possibility.
5. The plan should provide a basic breakdown of costs. We’re told that laying track from Baseline station to Blair, and from the Rideau Centre past the airport is only $660 million more expensive than upgrading the transitway? And that a fleet of a few dozen trains won’t cost much more to buy than the 690 buses that OC Transpo runs? That may be true, but it’s hard to believe without knowing where the numbers came from.

The proposed plan is fine – if we want to pay around three billion dollars to get the same service we have today.

1. The site says
   

   It is estimated that in 2001, about 250,000 person-trips were made in a typical weekday afternoon peak hour. Of these, about 74% were by automobile, 15% by transit, almost 10% by walking and just under 2% by cycling

   If we add up the automotive trips, then divide by total number of bus trips, we get 16.67%. (back)

As others have mentioned, the City of Ottawa has put together four possible plans for public transit in 2031. The four plans cover the same ground, they

• follow the current east/west arterials running parallel to the Ottawa river;
• head south as far as Bowesville and Barrhaven Town Centre;
• go north into Gatineau;
• feature a tunnel though the downtown.

The only difference is the mode: the first plan is entirely bus, with each of the other three plans phasing in gradually more light rail. Plan four has the most track, featuring rail lines from the current Baseline station to Blair with a dogleg down to Bowesville and the airport.

If I sound unexcited about the plans, it’s because they’re all pretty much the same. Swap tracks for Transitway, and add a few percentage points of capitol and ongoing costs, and they’re basically the same plan: what we have now. Even the growth projections for transit trips downtown are ho-hum: they project an overall rise of transit use (heading into the downtown core) of 10%.

Tomorrow: suggestions for what a transit plan should include.