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Riverside South’s commercial centre will get a light-rail station by 2021, Mayor Jim Watson announced Thursday, with the help of $50 million from the provincial government and $30 million in extra payments from the developers building the southeastern suburb.
The community has about 16,000 residents now but will eventually have 55,000 people and a “town centre” core, served by a diesel rail line that connects north to the O-Train tracks that now end at Greenboro.
“This is one of the first times that a city has actually gotten ahead of the curve, and we’re building the transit before the massive build-out of the homes, so we’re getting it right,” Watson said. Which, if you’ve been following transit growth in Ottawa for any length of time, oh my God.
A rail line very much like this one was supposed to have been open for nine years at this point, but city council cancelled it in late 2006 after then-mayor Bob Chiarelli lost an election over it to Larry O’Brien. The Chiarelli line was a “train to nowhere” back then, not worth building, city council decided, after previously deciding to build it.
The city replaced that plan with the line now a few months away from completion, running from Tunney’s Pasture to Blair Road.
Under Watson, the city had already put together money to extend the O-Train as far south as Bowesville, on the edge of Riverside South’s future boundary, as part of a $3-billion rail project that’s to send trains as far as Moodie Drive in the west, Algonquin College in the southwest and Trim Road in the east. But the money for the extra three kilometres, it just didn’t have, Watson said.
The result didn’t make any sense, Watson admitted now that it’s no longer the plan: “The initial spot where we let people off was basically in the middle of a field,” he said Thursday.
Ontario Transport Minister Bob Chiarelli (L) playfully mocks pounding Mayor Jim Watson (C) in the noggin while Royal Galipeau (R) concentrates on hitting the spike during a ceremony marking the laying of the first official rail track of the O-Train Confederation Line light rail transit project at the Belfast Yard maintenance and storage facility.
Chiarelli is now the MPP for Ottawa West-Nepean and the minister of infrastructure, and is facing an election again that his Liberal party could well lose. He got to pledge the $50 million to build the extension, and declined an opportunity to gloat.
“All I have to say about that is, you know, that particular debate resulted in my losing the election, and I exercised the discipline from that particular date to today to not comment on that,” Chiarelli said, and went no further on it.
The $50 million is, he said, money left over in a provincial infrastructure fund after the rest was spent on joint projects with the federal government. (Of course, if Chiarelli’s party loses power, the whole thing could go out the window again.)
Richcraft and Urbandale, Riverside South’s major property developers, have agreed to a special levy on sales in the area that will raise the other $30 million (they had the rug ripped out from under them in 2006 and have been lobbying to reinstate some form of the Chiarelli plan ever since). Neither the city nor the federal government will put money in directly.
The first phase of rail is costing $2.1 billion, with $900 million from the city and $600 million each from the province and feds. The second phase is costing $3 billion, with $1 billion from each government. Except for a spur to the airport and the segment from Place d’Orléans to Trim Road, the cost of which the federal and provincial governments are splitting. And this extension into Riverside South.
Politics drives all these decisions. Not the good kind of politics, where politicians figure out what people want and try to give it to them. The kind of politics where politicians use public money to screw each other.
Earlier Thursday in Toronto, Premier Kathleen Wynne sat down with Mayor John Tory to promise provincial money for three major transit routes — a $4.1-billion pledge to extend subways and build a new light-rail line along the Lake Ontario waterfront.
Justin Trudeau and Kathleen Wynne in one of their many transit-funding announcements, this one in 2016.
The subway line Toronto needs most, a “downtown relief line” giving a new underground route into the city core from the east, might — might! — be built by 2031. A wobble in the system at rush hour already destabilizes half the Toronto subway, leaving platforms crammed so full of commuters that some are worried innocent people will accidentally get jostled onto the tracks.
Toronto’s city council has spent the last four years or so transfixed by the stupidest transit project in Canada, a subway extension to Scarborough that will have one stop, never run more than half-full and cost at least $3.4 billion, and probably much more. The province is into that one for $2 billion, the federal government for $660 million.
They — we, actually, since it’s our government, too — are doing this dumb thing because Doug Ford and his brother, Rob, made it an article of faith when they were Toronto city politicians that Scarborough “deserves” a subway. Wynne and the Liberals now blame Doug Ford for that, and yet they were partners when it seemed like the way to get one Liberal, Education Minister Mitzie Hunter, elected in one Scarborough byelection.
By weird coincidence, the ceremony Wynne attended in her capacity as premier was accompanied by a news release from the Liberal party.
“As Conservative leader, (Doug) Ford is already promising to cut $10 billion a year in provincial spending, with a promise to review every single transit project underway,” it said, et cetera.
Ha ha, Toronto.
Well, not so fast. Here, we’re months away from opening Ottawa’s new electric light-rail line — our second attempt, after federal minister John Baird contrived to undermine Chiarelli’s plan and Chiarelli in the bargain. Friday, Watson and Chiarelli and others will get together again at the new Tremblay station for a Last Spike photo-op for O’Brien’s replacement project, affixing the last clip holding the last piece of track to the ground.
One of Ottawa’s new LRT cars in the unfinished Tremblay station.
Watson himself nearly sabotaged this one when he was a provincial politician plotting his run for mayor against O’Brien, arranging for it to be underfunded when he was the regional minister for Ottawa and then having to clean up his own mess when he discovered Ottawans actually wanted it. Now he’s touting the Chiarelli plan as something we probably should have done already.
Transit defines our cities — where millions of people live and work, how they get around, how they spend sometimes hours every day. It costs billions of dollars of everyone’s money. It deserves to be more than a plaything.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
The community has about 16,000 residents now but will eventually have 55,000 people and a “town centre” core, served by a diesel rail line that connects north to the O-Train tracks that now end at Greenboro.
“This is one of the first times that a city has actually gotten ahead of the curve, and we’re building the transit before the massive build-out of the homes, so we’re getting it right,” Watson said. Which, if you’ve been following transit growth in Ottawa for any length of time, oh my God.
A rail line very much like this one was supposed to have been open for nine years at this point, but city council cancelled it in late 2006 after then-mayor Bob Chiarelli lost an election over it to Larry O’Brien. The Chiarelli line was a “train to nowhere” back then, not worth building, city council decided, after previously deciding to build it.
The city replaced that plan with the line now a few months away from completion, running from Tunney’s Pasture to Blair Road.
Under Watson, the city had already put together money to extend the O-Train as far south as Bowesville, on the edge of Riverside South’s future boundary, as part of a $3-billion rail project that’s to send trains as far as Moodie Drive in the west, Algonquin College in the southwest and Trim Road in the east. But the money for the extra three kilometres, it just didn’t have, Watson said.
The result didn’t make any sense, Watson admitted now that it’s no longer the plan: “The initial spot where we let people off was basically in the middle of a field,” he said Thursday.
Ontario Transport Minister Bob Chiarelli (L) playfully mocks pounding Mayor Jim Watson (C) in the noggin while Royal Galipeau (R) concentrates on hitting the spike during a ceremony marking the laying of the first official rail track of the O-Train Confederation Line light rail transit project at the Belfast Yard maintenance and storage facility.
Chiarelli is now the MPP for Ottawa West-Nepean and the minister of infrastructure, and is facing an election again that his Liberal party could well lose. He got to pledge the $50 million to build the extension, and declined an opportunity to gloat.
“All I have to say about that is, you know, that particular debate resulted in my losing the election, and I exercised the discipline from that particular date to today to not comment on that,” Chiarelli said, and went no further on it.
The $50 million is, he said, money left over in a provincial infrastructure fund after the rest was spent on joint projects with the federal government. (Of course, if Chiarelli’s party loses power, the whole thing could go out the window again.)
Richcraft and Urbandale, Riverside South’s major property developers, have agreed to a special levy on sales in the area that will raise the other $30 million (they had the rug ripped out from under them in 2006 and have been lobbying to reinstate some form of the Chiarelli plan ever since). Neither the city nor the federal government will put money in directly.
The first phase of rail is costing $2.1 billion, with $900 million from the city and $600 million each from the province and feds. The second phase is costing $3 billion, with $1 billion from each government. Except for a spur to the airport and the segment from Place d’Orléans to Trim Road, the cost of which the federal and provincial governments are splitting. And this extension into Riverside South.
Politics drives all these decisions. Not the good kind of politics, where politicians figure out what people want and try to give it to them. The kind of politics where politicians use public money to screw each other.
Earlier Thursday in Toronto, Premier Kathleen Wynne sat down with Mayor John Tory to promise provincial money for three major transit routes — a $4.1-billion pledge to extend subways and build a new light-rail line along the Lake Ontario waterfront.
Justin Trudeau and Kathleen Wynne in one of their many transit-funding announcements, this one in 2016.
The subway line Toronto needs most, a “downtown relief line” giving a new underground route into the city core from the east, might — might! — be built by 2031. A wobble in the system at rush hour already destabilizes half the Toronto subway, leaving platforms crammed so full of commuters that some are worried innocent people will accidentally get jostled onto the tracks.
Toronto’s city council has spent the last four years or so transfixed by the stupidest transit project in Canada, a subway extension to Scarborough that will have one stop, never run more than half-full and cost at least $3.4 billion, and probably much more. The province is into that one for $2 billion, the federal government for $660 million.
They — we, actually, since it’s our government, too — are doing this dumb thing because Doug Ford and his brother, Rob, made it an article of faith when they were Toronto city politicians that Scarborough “deserves” a subway. Wynne and the Liberals now blame Doug Ford for that, and yet they were partners when it seemed like the way to get one Liberal, Education Minister Mitzie Hunter, elected in one Scarborough byelection.
By weird coincidence, the ceremony Wynne attended in her capacity as premier was accompanied by a news release from the Liberal party.
“As Conservative leader, (Doug) Ford is already promising to cut $10 billion a year in provincial spending, with a promise to review every single transit project underway,” it said, et cetera.
Ha ha, Toronto.
Well, not so fast. Here, we’re months away from opening Ottawa’s new electric light-rail line — our second attempt, after federal minister John Baird contrived to undermine Chiarelli’s plan and Chiarelli in the bargain. Friday, Watson and Chiarelli and others will get together again at the new Tremblay station for a Last Spike photo-op for O’Brien’s replacement project, affixing the last clip holding the last piece of track to the ground.
One of Ottawa’s new LRT cars in the unfinished Tremblay station.
Watson himself nearly sabotaged this one when he was a provincial politician plotting his run for mayor against O’Brien, arranging for it to be underfunded when he was the regional minister for Ottawa and then having to clean up his own mess when he discovered Ottawans actually wanted it. Now he’s touting the Chiarelli plan as something we probably should have done already.
Transit defines our cities — where millions of people live and work, how they get around, how they spend sometimes hours every day. It costs billions of dollars of everyone’s money. It deserves to be more than a plaything.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
