Let the outcry begin.
With details coming out that the city is leaning towards using the Richmond/Byron corridor for the West LRT, opposition is starting to build claiming that Carling Avenue should be the corridor of choice. Of course, the problems with using Carling have been clearly identified by planning staff and include:
- Carling at grade cannot handle the volume of transit traffic that will be generated by the line.
- Carling, either elevated or in a tunnel, will add a minimum of 10 minutes to all western destinations – and the whole point of LRT is to move more people more quickly.
- Carling, either elevated or in a tunnel, will be hundreds of millions of dollars more expensive than all of the other routes (combined).
- Using Carling for trunk services makes it impossible to use it for lighter, local services too – meaning the entire west end of the city will see less transit development that is needed.
There are a whole list of serious operational concerns with Carling as well, including how and where to link to the current Transitway corridor through Westboro – all options would need extensive tunnelling, and would require very tight turns that would again slow down service and limit the total volume of traffic the line can accommodate.
So, from an economic, urban planning, and basic transportation management perspective, Carling Avenue loses. So why the outcry against Richmond/Byron? Well, the people along Byron want to keep the linear park that has developed over the former streetcar right-of-way. As Ken Gray recently wrote in The Citizen, people like to walk their dogs there.
Of course, what needs to be considered is that both Richmond Road and Byron Avenue would get a facelift as part of any LRT development, and with good design and proper space management, the park can actually be improved upon with very little space lost to the LRT tracks.
As for the arguments that the intensification that would inevitably follow would “destroy” the local community – that is utter rubbish. Intensification is the evolution of a community. At no point should any community in this city be viewed as frozen and no longer appropriate for new development. Besides, most of the people making those arguments then point to Carling and talk about intensification along that corridor, making the point both hypocritical and yet another blast of Ottawa’s famous NIMBY’ism at work.
No matter which way you look at it, Richmond/Byron is the most logical corridor for bringing the LRT west. We just need our politicians to be brave enough to stand up and clearly support it.
