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© Clive Doucet 2007
Sunday June 17, 2007On the wrong track:
Go Train is a good idea but Ottawa really needs an intra-city transit plan
It’s difficult to know where to start with an evaluation
of the Mayor’s
Task Force but perhaps the simplest is this: It is not a urban transit
system for the city of Ottawa. It’s a Go Train proposal, similar to Toronto
using old heavy rail lines to outlying areas. Should Ottawa have a Go train
service to Smith’s Falls, Alexandria, Wakefield and so on. Absolutely!
Should Ottawa property tax payers pay for it? Absolutely not. Not even
the city of Toronto pays for the provincial Go Train service which serves
Burlington to Oshawa. The province does and we can thank Mr. Collenette
and his hardy band of volunteers for identifying this need for Eastern
Ontario and Western Quebec.
But let’s not confuse a Go Train service with an urban transit system, they don’t in Toronto and we shouldn’t here. An urban transit system, no matter where it is located from Edmonton to Strasbourg share common elements. In no particular order of importance, they are: 1) It travels where people live and work; 2) It is electric, not diesel. 3) It is double track to assure secure and frequent service. 4) It’s timely.
The Go Train proposal fails on all four counts.
- The cross town link travels through industrial parks and circles into the Alta Vista Train station which is an inter city station jammed between the 417, the Transitway and the Montreal-Toronto rail line.
- It is diesel. There is never any land uplift around diesel transportation. The Siemens proposal already had Memorandums of Understanding signed for hundreds of millions of real estate development around the north-south electric light rail stations at Walkley, Carleton University, University of Ottawa, Gladstone and Bayview. This is what happens around urban electric lines because they are clean and quiet. You can have a café a metre away from an electric line and no one will be bothered. After 35 years of diesel busways, there hasn’t been a nickel invested in station development. In fact, diesel pushes quality development away. The report suggests that it can all be converted at a later date and this is indeed possible, but since the system won’t be completed until 2031, most of us will not see that conversion in our lifetimes - if ever as the conversion of the present day transitway is not eligible for any funding from other governments. Once you build it, it tends to stay that way.
- It is not double track. It will rely on passing tracks and complex signalling. I can’t imagine any city that can afford it, deliberately choosing to build a system that will be difficult to maintain safety levels. Third world cities do this because they have no other choice.
- It doesn’t pass the timeliness test. It is too little, too late. In the four years that we would have built a two track, five minute, electric service all the way from Barrhaven to the University of Ottawa, we will see an extension of the present O train service to Leitrim on the same single track that exists now. Again a third world service and a third world time line.
In summary, this is an inter-city solution to an intra-city problem. Intra city service has to be dedicated, reliable, go where people live and work, not where old rails, shunts and railyards happen to be. More than twenty years ago, Edmonton and Calgary built all electric, dedicated services that went where people live in those cities. Why can’t we do the same in Ottawa in 2007?
Once upon a time, Ottawa had an electric streetcar system that fulfilled all the requirements of a first class urban transit system. It went where people lived, along Wellington and beside Richmond Road all the way to Britannia, along Montreal road, down Carling, Bronson, King Edward, all the principle streets of the city were served by it. It was powered by green power from the Chaudiere Falls. We designed and built the vehicles in Ottawa, invented sweepers to clear the snow and exported the Ottawa streetcars. It is this sustainable, green, useful, community enhancing transit system that we need to go back to, not a Go Train system for Eastern Ontario.
Electric light rail is the system that Toronto and Montreal are busy embracing. Toronto is now calling itself Transit City and will be building 17 surface lines at a cost of six billion dollars over the next few years. Montreal will be charging congestion charges to get on the island in automobiles and turning that money into reinstalling its own streetcar system. There is a reason General Motors, Firestone and company bought out over a 100 urban light rail systems in the 1930s and 40s and shut them down. They are effective and relative to the billions that must go into the road system to sustain it, inexpensive.
There’s only one sensible choice for Ottawa. We must go back to the Siemens project and get the environmental planning going for east-west rail again. The alternative is years of public transit stagnation while we continue to build roads faster than any other Canadian city. Right now, Ottawa spends 19% more per household on roads than the average from the closest seven cities to Ottawa and 43% more than Toronto. These cost comparisons do not include snow removal. 2007 will be another record breaking road year with 200 kilometres of new road going in – and we’re already building roads faster than we can fix them. Only 40 per cent of the roads that need renewal will get fixed this year. This is our lowest rate of renewal ever.
A Go Train system for Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec won’t solve Ottawa’s road and transit woes. It’s an inter-city solution for an intra-city problem. What’s best done with this report is to thank Mr. Colenette for taking on the task of finding new transportation solutions for the city; to begin lobbying the province for some Go Trains to outlying areas as he recommends and go back to building what Council was doing – building an electric, light rail system for the city.