April 29, 2008

Ottawa’s new transit plan should avoid promoting suburban sprawl

Construction Corner

Korky Koroluk

Politicians love slogans. They love the idea of encapsulating a complex idea in a few words so it will stick in people’s minds come voting day.

In Ottawa, Mayor Larry O’Brien did that successfully in the last civic election. He had promised no increase in property taxes for any of the four years his term would last, so he came up with “Zero Means Zero.”

This year though, zero means a little more than four per cent. But I quibble.

Now he’s got another: “Getting it Right.”

This one refers to the new rapid transit proposal for the city, and is a jab at the old, abandoned plan, which certainly had a few flaws.

In a nutshell, the new plan calls for a tunnel under the downtown core to accommodate an electric light-rail system that would extend outward only as far as the city’s surrounding green belt. The rails would be laid along the existing bus transitway, so the work would be relatively quick and cheap.

Service through and beyond the green belt would be provided by existing transitway, and construction of up to 60 kilometres of new transitway.

There is no thought of doing it all as a single project. Instead, work would be phased as funding becomes available. It’s widely believed that the downtown tunnel — the very core of the system — would be the first part built.

The whole thing might take 20 or 25 years, depending on who you’re talking to. The cost would be slightly more than $4 billion in constant 2008 dollars.

The city even ran the proposal past a panel people from Toronto, Vancouver, San Diego, Orlando and London, U.K., all of them with decades of experience in transit and urban planning. They suggested a few things that have been incorporated into the plan.

For example, they advocated keeping light rail within the green belt, instead of extending it at great cost to the far suburbs, thus encouraging more urban sprawl. Even the bus transitway shouldn’t be extended. That would simply mean more sprawl.

As for extending rail beyond the green belt, that shouldn’t happen for at least 20 years, and then only after population densities are sufficient for it to operate economically.

A worrisome thing that many Canadians have so far managed to ignore is the changing shape of many of the suburbs now being built in the United States.

It started with the New Urbanism movement that was born in the early 1980s. Advocates called for cities, suburbs and towns that are compact and walkable, that have a range of urban services, but on a small scale that offers shopping, employment and recreation opportunities.

And that’s just what has been built in suburban areas around Reston, Va., for example, White Plains, N.Y., Seattle, Detroit and other centres. More recently, the idea gained momentum as gasoline prices increased, then increased again.

If the U.S. trend continues, and if it comes to Canada (as U.S. trends often do), it will mean that the traditional car-dependent suburb that needs lots of expressways, arterial roads, and parking areas, will fall into disfavour. Indeed, a recent article in Atlantic suggested that they may become the slums of the future.

Instead, the article suggested, people are asking instead for livable suburbs with a lively community life on its sidewalks, in its parks, in its markets and cafes, places where kids can once again walk to school safely — all the things that the suburbs around Ottawa don’t offer.

When/if that happens, transit needs will change, and that’s why I find myself hoping that the city proceeds quickly with light rail within the green belt, but with great caution on the transitway proposals that might simply end up feeding suburbs where few people want to live.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com.

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