Appendix A_Pages266to338_9MB.pdf - Ottawa Confederation Line

Downtown Ottawa Transit Tunnel
Tunney’s Pasture to Blair Station via a Downtown LRT Tunnel
Planning and Environmental Assessment Study
Monday, October 26, 2009
Open House Presentation Question and Answers held in Council Chambers
Speaker Comment/Question Responded By Response
Why does the connection tunnel between
the train station and the light rail station
why do you have to cross the drop off zone
to ride into the station?
David Hopper The problem at the train station is there is only one level in the
train station and you come right out to the driveway and the
LRT station is only one level below. So the problem we have is
“what is the best way to get there?” We could either go down
inside the train station underneath the driveway, we then have
to come back up to go across the lawn then back down to the
train station so we would need to go down and up and then
down again. So we felt that it was better to just cross the bus
driveway and there is a stop sign there and a marked
crosswalk so like you do today, you would just cross the
driveway at the crosswalk and then carry onto the station, but
that would be something that we should looking at further on if
there isn’t a way to better encourage more of that pedestrian
travel and get rid of cars.
Thank you for a truly interesting
presentation. Especially downtown, but
not necessarily just limited to downtown,
there is a lot of dependence on private
property owners to give you access for
train station entrances. What is generally
the reaction to these private property
owners to cooperate with this project?
David Hopper
We have had very good response from the business
community. There is the Downtown Coalition (representing a
group of the downtown building owners and operators) which
has gotten together to be part of the process and they have
been very positive. They see a lot of benefits to the plan, and
if they have the entry directly into their facility they have an
advantage over a building across the street in terms of leasing.
They see a huge advantage of Albert and Slater returning to
more normal traffic patterns, possibly bike lanes with some
buses, but at much reduced bus volumes, so that it is easier to
get goods and services into their buildings. They see the
connections into the buildings as enhancing the rider
experience for people who come to their buildings so they have
been quite willing to talk. Of course they haven’t put their
money where their mouth is yet. They were a little sceptical to
begin with, particularly the idea that they should volunteer to
have a station under their building, but as we move forward
with more detail at each stage they become more and more
certain this is the way to go and we are quite confident that a
number of the large land owners downtown, like Brookfield who
have done this in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, know
Speaker Comment/Question Responded By Response
the advantages they just need to convince their Ottawa people
of it. So we are seeing very good cooperation and as we get
into the design we’ll be inviting them to be directly involved
with the development of those entrances.
David
Jeannes
Would the City be paying rent to the
property owners for the entrances and
what would be the City’s responsibilities
here and what would be specifically the
private property owner’s responsibilities to
these stations?
In terms of the coverage, particularly in
the downtown area would the four tunnel
stations, Campus, Downtown East,
Downtown West and Rideau, you have
diagrams that show the 300m circles and
the 800m circles which show how faraway
various buildings are. I have a couple of
issues, one is that some pretty important
buildings are outside the 800m circles like
Place Bell Canada and most of City Hall
and so on, and some others are in only by
virtue by the fact that the circles are the
kind of ignore that the Rideau Canal is in
the way and that you can’t actually reach
many of the destinations that are inside
the circle with 800m of walking and I am
adding to that the fact that there are
typically 3 levels of long escalators to get
to the surface which in my experience in
the Montreal means about 5 minutes time
from the platform to the surface. I really
think that this whole study needs to have a
significant pedestrian movement
component throughout the downtown in
order to determine whether the locations
that you have selected for your entrances
are in fact good ones. Some of them are
also missing some opportunity that the
City has been setting up and encouraging
N-S pedestrian mid-block connections. For
Vivi Chi
David Hopper
That would be part of the negotiations when we deal with the
private property owners. All those things need to be
considered, we have to make sure that there is an access
available for users during the hours of operation. So all those
things we need to work through, they are not new, they are
things that we do all the time, and we have a similar
agreement with St. Laurent right now that can be used as a
model.
Obviously to connect to one side of the street to another we
have to not only be underneath the pavement but underneath
all of the utilities that are underneath the street, so that does
get us a little further down. It has worked in other cities and
that does generally correspond with one level below grade or
one level plus a few steps. We are showing a little bit deeper
here but that would be the worst case but we would try to
locate those connections at a level that is conducive to cross
flow. We have looked at the catchment zone circles that we
have drawn. The first is a 300m circle, as the crow flows,
which is a 400m walk which is the City standard for walk, so
what we did instead of measuring them all exactly is take a
proxy of a 300m crow flies 400m walking. The second circle is
at 500m representing a 750-800m walk. It doesn’t work when
the Canal is in the way but it works generally in the downtown
area. We have 5 entrances on the west side of the Canal and
we think we have good coverage across the downtown. There
is no system in the world that connects to absolutely
everything. We had to make some decisions that the trade off
that was taken back earlier in the year was that the cross
country alignment took us from the more intensive future
development in the southwest of the downtown with a current
development in the centre east with a potential of the market
and Rideau Centre further north, so that cross country
alignment sort of brought us in and connected it. Yes City Hall
is a little bit beyond that but we can’t connect everything, but
we have connected to as much as we can and we believe that
downtown Ottawa is very walkable, it is only 7 blocks from one
end to the other, so we are really not that far from anything
downtown. As for the timing to exit out of the station I would