Light Rail Maintenance Yard Location 

Transport 2000 has participated by invitation in Federal and City consultations on the importance of redeveloping brownfield sites. Government planning policies favour this, even where costs may be higher than the alternative of continuing to use up greenspace. Yet the city failed to come up with a viable plan to redevelop the urban brownfield site at the Bayview snowdump and rail yards and you are about to fail again by taking pasture and woodland south of the airport instead of reusing Walkley Yard, Walkley was designated in the 1950 Gréber Plan as the site for all Ottawa’a rail yard and railway maintenance facilities. This use continues, limiting residential development nearby. 

You have an evaluation by the consultant team, which is being used to set aside many weeks of work and unanimous conclusions of the Public Working Group and the City’s Environmental and Forest and Greenspace advisory committees. Staff’s conclusion depends on a 15-point spread between Walkley Yard and  Bowesville 4C that is entirely due to the 15-point spread in the weighted score for a single criterion, cost. But I believe that staff have failed you and the taxpayer badly on both the capital and operating costs.   

On capital, the City gave away its option from the Light Rail Pilot Project to purchase Walkley Yard at $90,000 per acre. Staff then inflated the cost far above the price per acre that Canadian Pacific Railway was actually asking. They implied environmental cleanup would be far more costly than CPR believes. They even included as a cost, the 6-acre rail corridor that the City had already purchased from CPR between Bank and Albion.  

I met with CPR’s Real Estate Division on this matter, while your staff did not.  Yet the message was sent to the Mayor’s office that I was providing false information about CPR’s position and price.  CPR has denied this allegation and has asked the City to provide the basis for such statements.  If any of you councillors have been told this story, you should inform me and you should exclude it from your decision-making process. 

You are told that the operating plan dictated that the Bowesville 4C site must be used.  This OC Transpo plan was not part of the North-South EA, has not been presented to or approved by you, and the only technical team member who contributed to it, John Jensen, was not present at the Public Open House to answer questions.  It has a very high cost, including running trains that are scheduled to go out of service at the end of the morning peak, all the way from downtown to Leitrim Park and Ride, South of Carleton University these trains will be virtually empty. This adds 6 km compared to going out of service at Walkley. This extra cost will be repeated to go back downtown for the afternoon peak. 

Far worse than this, is the overall low productivity of the operations plan.  Labour efficiency will drop to half that of the present O-Train as the planners do not intend to run the electric LRT vehicles as trains. They will have only half as many seats per driver as the O-train and will add unnecessarily to downtown congestion on Albert and Slater. 

Building for a quite unnecessary 3-5 minute frequency is driving up capital costs for the signaling and infrastructure such as bridges and tunnels. Starting all service from so far south of downtown will mean a very uneven early morning and late night service pattern along the route, particularly from downtown and the transitway to Carleton University and eventually to the airport.  It also will not work well for future LRT extensions, whether on the east-west rail corridor, Walkley Road, Carling, Rideau, or to Gatineau. 

The rest of the world does not design LRT this way.  Calgary and Edmonton run 3-4 car LRT trains, Croydon, Sheffield, St. Louis, Portland, and other successful modern LRT systems have extensive single track. The only LRT expert invited to speak to the Public Working Group extolled the virtues of diesel LRT, single track, on-street operation, and sharing track with freight trains, Our experts said all of these were impossible for Ottawa. He only said the yard should be at the end of the line in a specific case. The City’s east-west LRT consultant, David Hopper, who is GO Transit’s principal planner, has told me he informed the city that costs would average out for the different possible yard locations. 

As I have been saying since the ORTEP plan in 2003, too much secrecy has enveloped this project. There have been backroom deals with developers, property owners, and the airport. The lack of meaningful consultation, except as legally required during the EA and as ordered by the Provincial Environment Ministry, has prevented the planners from responding to public expectations.  It has also precluded the broad consensus on Light Rail that we achieved for the O-Train Pilot project, whose process was much more open. 

Your staff have created a situation that could have detrimental impacts on our city’s environment and the operation of Light Rail for many years to come, We will still have a brownfield site at Walkley Yard, adjacent to the functioning Ottawa Central freight yard, diesel locomotive service shop, and Canadian National’s transload facility. Someone will eventually have to pay to remediate this land if any other use can be found for it.  

At the same time, staff are claiming that any changes at this point could delay this important project. We don’t see how the construction of a suitable building and facilities in a vacant rail yard, even with O-Train tracks running through it, can jeopardize a project whose trains will not be delivered for almost three years. If necessary, the O-Train could even be temporarily detoured on the newly acquired NCC land adjacent to the yard. 

You had plenty of opportunity to get it right and to reap the environmental and transportation benefits of a well-planned project, conforming to our Official Plan, Transportation Master Pan, and Rapid Transit Expansion Study, as well as to federal policies on re-use of rail corridors and brownfields. This recommendation is wrong. 

David L. Jeanes, P.Eng.

President Transport 2000 Canada, 613-725-9484, david@jeanes.ca