Ottawa Sun
Published: Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Tunnel on right path: Putting LRT under east-wet downtown corridor key to easing traffic

Just four months remain until the 2010 election. And while there are refreshing newcomers vying for city council, when it comes to issues it’s 2006 all over again: Transit, taxes and leadership. And the transit tunnel is the most contentious.

In 2006, the north-south LRT route was the focus. It was ultimately cancelled because it did not respond to clear and present east-west transit ridership needs, did not alleviate downtown gridlock, and its route southward was dubious at best in terms of the ability to dramatically boost long-term ridership.

Today, the east-west LRT, downtown tunnel option is the bigger, better and yes, more expensive subject of public scrutiny and debate.

By way of comparison, the 2006 project had a hard engineering price-tag of $881 million with $200 million in funding from the feds, another $200 million from the province and the city responsible for the remaining $481 million with the Dufferin-PCL-Siemens consortium on the hook for any cost overruns.

Meanwhile the present plan has an initial soft engineering cost-estimate of $2.1 billion with the feds and province each in for $600 million and the city left to find the other $900 million. Mathematically, this is a better deal than 2006 but, in fairness to critics, the final costs are still to be determined.

Sadly, some candidates, especially in the east end, are making political hay out of the transit project by questioning the merit of the tunnel and offering up the folly, fiction and fantasy that we can run light rail on the surface of Albert and/or Slater streets and re-allocate the projected tunnel cost (estimated at $735 million) to extend the LRT out further east and west quicker.

This is not only irresponsible; it is ludicrous in the extreme. Sorry folks, LRT — which has its own failings vis-a-vis bus rapid transit — only works well over the long-term in a grade separated or dedicated environment.

The problem for Ottawa’s transit system now is the capacity bottleneck in the downtown core. Simple observation of bus stacking during rush hours on Albert and Slater, sometimes from Bronson through to the Mackenzie King bridge on both streets, makes the case for a tunnel.

And the origin-destination studies of car trips from the east, south, west and north from Quebec into the downtown core show that this volume will continue to increase. The immediate and long-term solution to unclog the core is to go underneath the city.

And with the number of car garages with entries or exits on Albert and Slater, a cut and cover solution (like the original Toronto subway or the Big Dig in Boston) would be an engineering nightmare. These parkades also buttress the case against mixing light rail and car traffic ... another major flaw in the original 2006 LRT project. Meanwhile advances made by the Spaniards and Dutch in tunnel boring technology make it more reliable and cost effective than ever before.

Do we have to watch the costs of a tunnel like hawks? Absolutely! And the engineering work between conceptual/functional design and actual construction should also be split to reinforce accountability.

But for candidates who say abandon the tunnel, regardless of what may go through it, buses, LRT or a heavy-rail subway at some point, please do your homework and think again.