Appendix A_Pages266to338_9MB.pdf - Ottawa Confederation Line

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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
Speaker Comment/Question Responded By Response example, midway between Metcalfe and O’Connor but you are one block west of that midway between Bay and Bronson but you are one block east of that, and things like that. The linkages into the buildings in many case, because the mezzanine levels are quite deep, you are showing a 2 nd or a 3 rd parking level of buildings whereas most of the buildings do have any retail potential at sub-basement level and in some cases one really doesn’t have much happening down at that deep level, so I just think that there is a lot more that can be done in terms of the pedestrian benefits of the whole network downtown. Vivi Chi the station. I have a concern about the Train station. Some of the townships around here have been talking Ontario and VIA Rail about bringing commuter trains into Ottawa. By moving the station at the Train station you have added approximately 100m onto the distance to be walked from the platforms from one to another which is an additional 2 minutes walk in the morning and 2 minutes walk in the afternoon. I assume that you have some sort of contingency plan to smile sweetly at the provincial people when they sort of say, but it doesn’t run in conjunction with, it doesn’t help bringing the township people in you are sinking that sort of one just by 2 minutes a day and it doesn’t sound like much but it does make a difference. I am a little bit surprised to see the cost of converting the transitway portions to light rail. I think of Calgary where their west LRT is being built right now is about $700M for 10 or 12 kms. If I’m not mistaken, it has fly overs and tunnel stations and trenches and that seems to include all rail vehicles, so that is only slightly more per km if all rail vehicles than David Hopper Vivi Chi suggest that if you were just going to stand on an escalator and ride it all the way up, you are better off taking the elevator and it won’t take you anywhere near 5 minutes to get out of I would also like to add that David you make a really good point because the pedestrian connection and what do we do in downtown for on the streets once our transit service is moved primarily underground. That gives us a great opportunity to look at what remains and we do have to have a thorough study which is going to overlay the transportation facilities, cycling, pedestrians and others onto the downtown system, including a local bus network in the downtown core. There will have to be some of that still continuing. We want the animation on the surface as well rather than everything down below. Well we do have a trade off to make and the trade off that was made 25 years ago was to bring the buses as close to the train station as possible, but not actually consider the future of light rail. If they had actually built the original transitway to LRT standards, it probably would of been built almost where it is, so we do need to consider that but any solution that brought rail closer to the train station became exorbitantly expensive. Light rail technology does require significant capital to build and you would have to have this section completely built before you can use it. Whereas the transitway is a step towards providing rapid transit more cheaply sooner and that was a decision that was taken in the late 1970’s. We are talking about a existing condition that, the costs are the conversion and we have significant line items of that and you are saying should we then stop building any transitways into the suburbs and wait for light rail. I think that it is important to provide Speaker Comment/Question Responded By Response the conversion costs. So my question here is have we learned our lesson not to build busways and then convert them. No more busway building, because if it is going to cost this much to convert them, $40M a station, $20M per km, that’s a lot of money to spend on the conversion when we should be building LRT from the outset and our TMP is full of new busways. David Hopper Doug I have 2 questions. My first question is that I was confused; some person out there told me that the project will be done by 2018 or something and then you said it was 2031. Will there be a huge fare jump? Right now bus fare is jumping. So does possible decrease in bus fare exist? I haven’t seen any numbers regarding the proportion of people using their cars or the proposed bus services right now, comparing them to the plan for say 2018 and then 2031, I am hoping that in all these plans that you have do you expect to have less people driving and more people using transit, am I right? Hence the 2 nd question, when you say expand the system does it mean take if further away or make it denser within this central neighbourhood? So you are not hoping as much as you are going to work against urban sprawl, you are not going to try and contain it as much David Hopper David Hopper David Hopper Vivi Chi Vivi Chi David Hopper rapid transit service as soon as we can and we look at what we can do and of course we will after 25 years of experience in operating and designing transitways, sure there are some lessons learned, but I think we need to provide rapid transit, regardless of technology, sooner rather than later. Yes there are some lessons learned from this exercise and this first project that will change the way we do future transitways, so yes we will be consciously doing that as we move forward. No there are 2 things happening, this project will be done sometime around the 2018 but extending east of Blair out into Orleans will likely not happen until after 2031 so that is a future project. No, the numbers that we are projecting for future operating costs indicate that by having rail, we will actually reduce the cost of operating the system. This will give City Council a choice to say “we will hold fares and not increase them” or reduce the property tax burden and go to a 55% split from a cost recovery from the user. So to operate the whole network will be cheaper with rail than without rail. Possibly, but although I would suggest that what will happen is they just won’t increase as quickly rather than actually being reduced. You are absolutely correct that part of our TMP we are developing the rapid transit network at work and we have a goal, a target of 30% mode split for transit and the rest is primarily, cyclists and pedestrians in there so in order to achieve that 30% we have to have this rapid transit system including this project that you see here tonight if we don’t do this of course we will not get moved from the 23% to 30% and those are considerate numbers and if anything we may not even be able to keep our 23% if we don’t expand our system and provide better facilities. All sorts in there, improving the service so that it is attractive to transit in what we have in existing areas as well as the expansion. This is all integrated and I think light rail will actually go towards encouraging closer development and more intense development around the stations which will be people who are
Page 1 and 2: ©2009 Microsoft Corporation ©2009
Page 3 and 4: ©2009 Microsoft Corporation Future
Page 5 and 6: TRANSPORTATION INFORMATION TE WATER
Page 7 and 8: Downtown Ottawa Transit Tunnel: Tun
Page 9 and 10: LeBreton Station Overview • Trans
Page 11 and 12: Downtown East Station Overview •
Page 14 and 15: Campus • Station Overview • Loc
Page 16 and 17: Train Station Overview • Provides
Page 18 and 19: Cyrville Station Overview • Will
Page 20 and 21: Maintenance and Storage Facility
Page 22 and 23: Transitway Conversion • Conversio
Page 24 and 25: Bus Operations - East Technology Se
Page 26 and 27: Next Steps • Report to Transit Co
Page 28 and 29: La somme de 15 millions par chaque
Page 30 and 31: Station Rideau Campus Comments I d
Page 32 and 33: Station Comments Good plan for maxi
Page 34 and 35: You said it was a study not a proje
Page 36 and 37: le commerce au détail. Maintenue l
Page 40 and 41: Speaker Comment/Question Responded
Page 42 and 43: Speaker Comment/Question Responded
Page 44: Speaker Comment/Question Responded
Page 47 and 48: File Number: D06-01-07-DOTT 26 Augu
Page 49 and 50: Memorandum To: File Date: August 27
Page 52: POST−NOTICE OF COMMENCEMENT CONSU
Page 55 and 56: DowntownOttawaTransitTunnel(DOTT):
Page 58 and 59: CONSULTATION GROUP MEETING #6 - Age
Page 60 and 61: Downtown Ottawa Transit Tunnel: Tun
Page 62 and 63: Federal EA Requirements • A feder
Page 64 and 65: Thank You!
Page 66 and 67: DOWNTOWN OTTAWA TRANSIT TUNNEL TO30

Appendix A_Pages266to338_9MB.pdf - Ottawa Confederation Line

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