11-13-2017, 10:15 AM
Canard, I would say that some of the station infrastructure is a response to the very suburban hub-and-spoke design of Ottawa's transit system. The station at Blair Road is often shown as being a grandiose station, but indeed it needs to be sizable (and the decades-old structure needed redoing even before LRT needed to be fit in). Dozens of routes flowed through that area to bring people to and from the transitway, and since this is the terminus, it effectively needs LRT as well as all the old bus lines which continue Eastward. The site itself is a bit nightmarish for transit users; the nearest homes are half a kilometer of pedestrian-hostility away. If we considered some of the original LRT documents, suggesting that the real region of influence of a station was a 500m radius, this site would have highway and parking lot gobbling up that entire area and then some.
All that is to say that the structures are almost a red herring. The city of Ottawa's LRT system is shiny and new, but at the moment, the organization of the transit system around it, and of city-building in general, is as painfully inadequate as ever. I'm disgusted that what was once a useful stop near my parents' home, with buses every hour or 45 minutes, half hour during peak times, and a peak time express route, all has fallen away to a two bus out, two bus in schedule for weekdays only, and a more than 1km walk to the nearest transit line of any calibre. We complain in Waterloo Region about how our cycling infrastructure is done so piecemeal, that we will have a golden segregated bike setup in UpTown and so few ways to connect smoothly to and from it, but Ottawa is playing that same "shiny shiny look over here" game orders of magnitude more expensive with how they develop their system and city, still very much about the personal automobile.
All that is to say that the structures are almost a red herring. The city of Ottawa's LRT system is shiny and new, but at the moment, the organization of the transit system around it, and of city-building in general, is as painfully inadequate as ever. I'm disgusted that what was once a useful stop near my parents' home, with buses every hour or 45 minutes, half hour during peak times, and a peak time express route, all has fallen away to a two bus out, two bus in schedule for weekdays only, and a more than 1km walk to the nearest transit line of any calibre. We complain in Waterloo Region about how our cycling infrastructure is done so piecemeal, that we will have a golden segregated bike setup in UpTown and so few ways to connect smoothly to and from it, but Ottawa is playing that same "shiny shiny look over here" game orders of magnitude more expensive with how they develop their system and city, still very much about the personal automobile.