Re: Andy's got a better idea
Kelly Egan, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, July 20, 2007

RE: Ex-regional chairman says buses, transitways better than trains

Mr. Egan says that Mr. Haydon is perhaps the only eminence grise in town who knows how to drive a bus.

One of the Mayor's Task Force members, Mr. Terry Findlay, drove a city bus for 28 years before spending the last 6 years driving the O-Train.

Mr. Haydon says that "It seems most transit people in North America view our bus transitway system as an incredible success, ..."

Many transit people in North America find our bus Transitway incredible, but not for the reasons Mr. Haydon espouses.

They can not believe that, given the success of light rail in places such as San Diego, that bus people from
Ottawa would come down and tell them they need busways, instead of light rail.

They can not believe that, given the higher labour productivity, lower operating costs, lower energy costs, lower maintenance costs, faster boarding and deboarding time, better ride quality, and greater schedule reliability of LRT versus buses, that anyone would propose replacing high capacity light rail with buses.

A three car electric light rail train can carry 600 riders, with one operator.

Our diesel O-Train carries as many riders as five 40 foot
low floor buses, or three articulated buses.

Buses burn three times the fuel that the diesel O-Train
uses, to move the same number of riders.

Buses therefore produce three times the pollution, on a
per-rider basis, compared to the O-Train.

The O-Train line requires virtually no snow plowing, and no salting. It gets plowed, on average, once per winter.

The new rails on the O-Train line will need replacing in about forty years. The bus Transitway needs repaving every five years, on average, and some stations needed repaving every two years.

Mr. Haydon claims that the Collenette proposal to put light rail on existing rail lines will be unacceptable to the transit public and will drastically reduce ridership.

During the "grand" period of Ottawa's busway construction, from 1983 to 1996, ridership on OC Transpo went from about 80 million a year down to 70 million.

The bus Transitway did nothing to increase ridership.

The O-Train, in contrast, has seen its ridership increase by 18% per year since it opened in fall 2001.

It is now carrying, during the school year, twice as
many riders as originally projected. A fifth of those riders are "new to transit", i.e., would not be using transit if
the O-Train were not there.!

Travel time savings by transferring to the train, instead of journeying completely by bus, are claimed by the
riders themselves to be as much as twenty minutes.

Mr. Haydon argues that "a pair of downtown bus tunnels are essential to completing the system."

A single double track light rail tunnel under downtown, which would have a passenger capacity greatly exceeding what could be done with buses, would be half the cost of twin bus tunnels.

Mr. Haydon states that "Reliability and time are the two
parameters that define success -- and that is why a tunnel is the critical issue. Multiple transfers at Bayview and Hurdman will have a devastating effect on both!"

Travellers transfer now, at Bayview to the O-Train, at Lebreton to buses for downtown Hull, and at Hurdman for buses going everywhere.

They also transfer in huge numbers at Lincoln Fields, St. Laurent, Greenboro, Bayshore, and numerous other places in the system.

Forty percent of OC Transpo bus riders transfer to other buses.

Seventy four per cent of O-Train riders transfer to or from a bus, at one or both ends of their trip. They must be doing so willingly, because ridership is twice expectations!

Studies from U.S. cities show that transit systems that emphasize transfers, to give people a better range of destinations, have a greater transit penetration than systems that emphasize the single seat, no transfer trip from your suburban home to your downtown office.

Mr. Haydon says that "the province promised money years ago for a tunnel for buses."

What the province is now saying, is that they have $200 million available for light rail, and possibly more for a more comprehensive system.

But, they want to see a coherent, practical, cost effective plan first.

The Mayor and Council have two such plans in their hands now- one is called the "Practical Plan" from the Friends of the O-Train, and the other is called "Moving Ottawa", from the Mayor's Task Force.

Mr. Haydon claims that "On the strength of the transitway, annual ridership in Ottawa stands at 120 per capita, well ahead of Calgary (85), Edmonton (75), Vancouver (75) and Halifax (55)."

Ottawa's ridership per capita was higher than that,
before the bus Transitway was built.

Mr. Haydon says "There is nothing magic about a train.
In rush hours, you will be standing, weaving from side to side. The concept of a reserved seat is simply not going to happen."

The ride on the O-Train is considerably more comfortable than riding buses, especially for standees.

Where does Mr. Egan get the notion that it's all-rail or nothing?

Both the Task Force and the Friends of the O-Train plans, redeploy buses from downtown to provide a more frequent feeder service from everybody's neighbourhood to a rail line, without having to buy any additional buses.

These plans would double the frequency of bus service, City wide, by not trying to run every bus in town through downtown, and by using trains to carry people to downtown. Doubling bus frequency would reduce the impact of having to make more transfers. It would make getting to many places in addition to downtown much more practical than it is now, with local bus service increased to 15 minutes from the current 30 minute service.

We would also use our existing rail lines, which are mostly grade-separated, to provide bypasses around downtown. Only 23% of peak period trips are going downtown.

A train using the VIA and Ottawa Central Railway line from the Alta Vista train station to Woodroffe Avenue, combined with a two minute bus ride on Woodroffe to Algonquin College, would get east end students to school about ten minutes faster than the proposed extension of the #118 bus.

Mr. Egan says that "an improved transitway is better than the Task Force proposals, which put trains in the wrong place and only make sense if a tunnel is bored."

The bus Transitway is built largely on or beside existing or former rail corridors, and Mr. Haydon's plan calls for a
tunnel to be bored.

The Task Force's crucial recommendation is that, once we have rail service running on the other existing corridors, to provide alternatives to the Transitway, then we can move forward on converting the bus Transitway to light rail, and get all the benefits of lower operating and maintenance costs that trains provide, compared to trying to do it all with buses.

Tim Lane,
Member, Friends of the O-Train and Transport 2000