- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,254
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
A new deal between the Ottawa and Gatineau transit agencies will clear Outaouais buses from Rideau and Wellington Street in front of Parliament once Ottawa’s light-rail system opens next year, the two services announced Friday.
Some routes will move onto Albert and Slater streets, taking over room vacated by OC Transpo when transit services moves into the underground rail tunnel. But the Société de transport de l’Outaouais will drastically reduce the number of buses that loop east-west through downtown Ottawa, in favour of north-south trips that connect to the LRT stations at LeBreton Flats and Lyon Street by zipping across the Ottawa River and then turning around to return to Gatineau.
“The partnership that we’re describing today — OC Transpo and STO have reached an agreement that’s a benefit to passengers of both systems,” said Pat Scrimgeour, OC Transpo’s manager in charge of planning. “We’ll be able to move a lot of buses off Ottawa streets and repurpose those buses for other uses.”
For STO riders, it should be easier to make transfers to Ottawa’s new trains, promised Renée Lafrenière, the Gatineau agency’s director of communications.
“It wasn’t easy but we had to do it,” Lafrenière said in French, explaining the agreement at Scrimgeour’s side at STO’s operations centre off Highway 50 on Friday afternoon.
The agreement, in the making since winter 2016, cuts buses from Wellington Street between Bank and O’Connor completely, and from Wellington between O’Connor and Elgin (in front of Parliament) by 94 per cent, according to the agencies’ figures.
Wellington has always been a problem for the STO, Lafrenière said, with frequent detours and complications involving tour buses and ceremonies. Removing her agency’s buses from it will make service more reliable and easier to manage, she said. According to the STO’s estimates, 73 per cent of its riders who are bound for downtown Ottawa will see their trip times shortened.
“There’s not less buses going into Ottawa. They don’t travel the same way and they don’t go as far,” Lafrenière said, describing the new plan.
More southerly streets, like Albert and Slater, will take up some of the bus traffic but will still see reductions in buses of about two-thirds.
“The bus volumes will be much, much lower … than the heavy OC Transpo service that’s there now,” Scrimgeour said, to a degree that’s compatible with making those Transitway routes nicer to walk, work and shop on.
Practically everybody who gets off an STO bus in Ottawa now walks south. “We’ll be dropping them closer to where their end destination is,” Lafrenière said.
(Though, she said, the ByWard Market will be a little bit more difficult to reach by Gatineau bus, requiring a longer walk from a stop or a transfer to an OC Transpo train.)
Buses will cross the Mackenzie King Bridge at the south end of the Rideau Centre and use Waller and Rideau streets and King Edward Avenue. Most of the routes involved will switch to using the Portage and Macdonald-Cartier bridges if they don’t already.
STO carries a lot of people who live in Gatineau but work in Ottawa, and historically it’s run an awful lot of buses on Ottawa streets. They’ve clogged King Edward, laid up on side streets, contributed to stop-start traffic on Wellington. Ottawa has no authority over them, any more than Gatineau has authority over OC Transpo buses on its side of the river.
O-Train fans have occasionally fantasized about extending the north-south train line into Gatineau without Gatineau’s co-operation, which Ottawa could do if it really, really, really wanted to. The laws governing trains aren’t the same as the ones governing road traffic but it’s the same idea: each city relies on the other’s goodwill to make interprovincial transit work.
The two cities have co-operated better lately but it’s been a project of decades. One of Ottawa’s worries about removing OC Transpo buses from the heavily used routes on Albert and Slater has been that the STO would just take up the space with its own buses. Unlike Ottawa, the STO has bet its future on buses instead of rail.
More to come.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Some routes will move onto Albert and Slater streets, taking over room vacated by OC Transpo when transit services moves into the underground rail tunnel. But the Société de transport de l’Outaouais will drastically reduce the number of buses that loop east-west through downtown Ottawa, in favour of north-south trips that connect to the LRT stations at LeBreton Flats and Lyon Street by zipping across the Ottawa River and then turning around to return to Gatineau.
“The partnership that we’re describing today — OC Transpo and STO have reached an agreement that’s a benefit to passengers of both systems,” said Pat Scrimgeour, OC Transpo’s manager in charge of planning. “We’ll be able to move a lot of buses off Ottawa streets and repurpose those buses for other uses.”
For STO riders, it should be easier to make transfers to Ottawa’s new trains, promised Renée Lafrenière, the Gatineau agency’s director of communications.
“It wasn’t easy but we had to do it,” Lafrenière said in French, explaining the agreement at Scrimgeour’s side at STO’s operations centre off Highway 50 on Friday afternoon.
The agreement, in the making since winter 2016, cuts buses from Wellington Street between Bank and O’Connor completely, and from Wellington between O’Connor and Elgin (in front of Parliament) by 94 per cent, according to the agencies’ figures.
Wellington has always been a problem for the STO, Lafrenière said, with frequent detours and complications involving tour buses and ceremonies. Removing her agency’s buses from it will make service more reliable and easier to manage, she said. According to the STO’s estimates, 73 per cent of its riders who are bound for downtown Ottawa will see their trip times shortened.
“There’s not less buses going into Ottawa. They don’t travel the same way and they don’t go as far,” Lafrenière said, describing the new plan.
More southerly streets, like Albert and Slater, will take up some of the bus traffic but will still see reductions in buses of about two-thirds.
“The bus volumes will be much, much lower … than the heavy OC Transpo service that’s there now,” Scrimgeour said, to a degree that’s compatible with making those Transitway routes nicer to walk, work and shop on.
Practically everybody who gets off an STO bus in Ottawa now walks south. “We’ll be dropping them closer to where their end destination is,” Lafrenière said.
(Though, she said, the ByWard Market will be a little bit more difficult to reach by Gatineau bus, requiring a longer walk from a stop or a transfer to an OC Transpo train.)
Buses will cross the Mackenzie King Bridge at the south end of the Rideau Centre and use Waller and Rideau streets and King Edward Avenue. Most of the routes involved will switch to using the Portage and Macdonald-Cartier bridges if they don’t already.
STO carries a lot of people who live in Gatineau but work in Ottawa, and historically it’s run an awful lot of buses on Ottawa streets. They’ve clogged King Edward, laid up on side streets, contributed to stop-start traffic on Wellington. Ottawa has no authority over them, any more than Gatineau has authority over OC Transpo buses on its side of the river.
O-Train fans have occasionally fantasized about extending the north-south train line into Gatineau without Gatineau’s co-operation, which Ottawa could do if it really, really, really wanted to. The laws governing trains aren’t the same as the ones governing road traffic but it’s the same idea: each city relies on the other’s goodwill to make interprovincial transit work.
The two cities have co-operated better lately but it’s been a project of decades. One of Ottawa’s worries about removing OC Transpo buses from the heavily used routes on Albert and Slater has been that the STO would just take up the space with its own buses. Unlike Ottawa, the STO has bet its future on buses instead of rail.
More to come.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
