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The city and its light-rail contractor have had to be stopped from cutting one of Ottawa’s showpiece bike routes.
The path runs from the Ottawa River to Carling Avenue, parallel to Preston Street, and it’s one of Ottawa’s bike triumphs. In the last four years, we spent several million dollars upgrading it from the muddy, bumpy track it used to be, adding safe crossings of the east-west roads and even separate tracks for cyclists and pedestrians in busy spots.
You can get to O-Train stations, to the Plant Recreation Centre on Somerset Street, to City Centre, to just about anywhere on Preston, and to the heavy-duty paths along the river, Prince of Wales Drive and the Rideau Canal, all without braving a busy street. The Trillium multi-use pathway, as it’s called, is a great case of fixing one of the missing links that are such a problem with Ottawa’s bike network.
Near the north end, the pathway runs through the Bayview O-Train station underneath Albert Street and the Transitway. That’s where the problem is.
Bayview station is being turned into a light-rail hub. It’s already the north end of the O-Train line and will be a transfer point for passengers on the east-west LRT starting in 2018. The path goes through an area that’s supposed to become a “fare-paid zone,” like a TTC or Métro station, which means blocking access to the station from all but a few controlled points. You certainly won’t be able to ride a bike through it, or stroll through on your way somewhere else.
Somehow the path has to go under or over the tracks. Under — where the path goes now — is impossible if a new station takes up all the space.
So an initial plan went with over. That meant a climb of at least 30 feet, maybe more, which required a huge veer off to one side to make the slope manageable, plus some kind of overpass arrangement. Officially, there’d be a path. Practically speaking, it would break the link we just spent $4 million improving. People who saw that draft flipped out.
Coun. Jeff Leiper’s ward, Kitchissippi, is just on the other side of the O-Train tracks and many of his constituents use the path. Temporary detours around the current construction generate enough complaints, he said — a permanent detour that would be much worse is “obviously completely unacceptable. … We have to preserve that straight north-south shot as much as possible.”
“The City is currently working with the contractor, Rideau Transit Group, to design an accessible routing for pedestrians and cyclists around the future Bayview station,” acknowledged Steve Cripps, the head of the city’s rail office, in an email relayed through the city’s communications department. “Work is still ongoing and plans will be presented once the work has been finalized.”
Rideau Transit Group’s job is to build a rail line. Sticking up for things that are not the line is the city’s job, and as we’ve seen the city isn’t very good at that.
The city botched its plans for the Booth Street bridge at the next rail station east in a similar set of circumstances. Faced with the prospect of passengers transferring from east-west trains to north-south buses having to cross a bike track, the city decided it was best not to build one along Booth — even though its own analysis showed biking on the road will be dangerous and many cyclists will choose to ride on the sidewalk instead.
“This isn’t an expensive problem to fix, if you do it before you start laying pavement down,” said Michael Powell, the president of the nearby Dalhousie Community Association. However many people might ride bicycles to the station, many more will just want to get past.
“We want to make sure the path’s continuous. That’s a priority,” Powell said.
It’s further complicated, said Leiper, by plans for a tower complex immediately to the south, including partly over the O-Train line. Somehow all these things have to work together — and soon, because they’re getting going on the station now.
The deeper lesson, from both the Booth Street and Bayview messes, is that the rail designers need to be reminded regularly that a train line isn’t the only thing they’re building.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The path runs from the Ottawa River to Carling Avenue, parallel to Preston Street, and it’s one of Ottawa’s bike triumphs. In the last four years, we spent several million dollars upgrading it from the muddy, bumpy track it used to be, adding safe crossings of the east-west roads and even separate tracks for cyclists and pedestrians in busy spots.
You can get to O-Train stations, to the Plant Recreation Centre on Somerset Street, to City Centre, to just about anywhere on Preston, and to the heavy-duty paths along the river, Prince of Wales Drive and the Rideau Canal, all without braving a busy street. The Trillium multi-use pathway, as it’s called, is a great case of fixing one of the missing links that are such a problem with Ottawa’s bike network.
Near the north end, the pathway runs through the Bayview O-Train station underneath Albert Street and the Transitway. That’s where the problem is.
Bayview station is being turned into a light-rail hub. It’s already the north end of the O-Train line and will be a transfer point for passengers on the east-west LRT starting in 2018. The path goes through an area that’s supposed to become a “fare-paid zone,” like a TTC or Métro station, which means blocking access to the station from all but a few controlled points. You certainly won’t be able to ride a bike through it, or stroll through on your way somewhere else.
Somehow the path has to go under or over the tracks. Under — where the path goes now — is impossible if a new station takes up all the space.
So an initial plan went with over. That meant a climb of at least 30 feet, maybe more, which required a huge veer off to one side to make the slope manageable, plus some kind of overpass arrangement. Officially, there’d be a path. Practically speaking, it would break the link we just spent $4 million improving. People who saw that draft flipped out.
Coun. Jeff Leiper’s ward, Kitchissippi, is just on the other side of the O-Train tracks and many of his constituents use the path. Temporary detours around the current construction generate enough complaints, he said — a permanent detour that would be much worse is “obviously completely unacceptable. … We have to preserve that straight north-south shot as much as possible.”
“The City is currently working with the contractor, Rideau Transit Group, to design an accessible routing for pedestrians and cyclists around the future Bayview station,” acknowledged Steve Cripps, the head of the city’s rail office, in an email relayed through the city’s communications department. “Work is still ongoing and plans will be presented once the work has been finalized.”
Rideau Transit Group’s job is to build a rail line. Sticking up for things that are not the line is the city’s job, and as we’ve seen the city isn’t very good at that.
The city botched its plans for the Booth Street bridge at the next rail station east in a similar set of circumstances. Faced with the prospect of passengers transferring from east-west trains to north-south buses having to cross a bike track, the city decided it was best not to build one along Booth — even though its own analysis showed biking on the road will be dangerous and many cyclists will choose to ride on the sidewalk instead.
“This isn’t an expensive problem to fix, if you do it before you start laying pavement down,” said Michael Powell, the president of the nearby Dalhousie Community Association. However many people might ride bicycles to the station, many more will just want to get past.
“We want to make sure the path’s continuous. That’s a priority,” Powell said.
It’s further complicated, said Leiper, by plans for a tower complex immediately to the south, including partly over the O-Train line. Somehow all these things have to work together — and soon, because they’re getting going on the station now.
The deeper lesson, from both the Booth Street and Bayview messes, is that the rail designers need to be reminded regularly that a train line isn’t the only thing they’re building.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
