News Article: NCC putting in a lot of conditions for the downtown site

[Micklebot]

regardless it still won't be as efficient as the transit system.

The express bus system was great for right now, the train is a solution aimed at addressing the issues that are coming as the city continues to grow. It also depends on how you measure efficiency. Bus Rapid Transit systems typically has higher long term costs than LRT. Everything has it's pros and cons.

 

[Cosmix]

Booooooo
You must work at the ncc.

Nope. I don't work!

 

[Micklebot]

Nope. I don't work!

Typical public servant...

 

[Cosmix]

Typical public servant...

I'm old and retired after working for 38 years full time and 10 years on contract part time. Now I can do whatever I want whenever I want. If my wife lets me.

 

[Stylizer1]

In a perfect world the 95 and 96 bus routes would have been replaced by high capacity trains running very frequently so that the express buses would stop at the train stations and passengers could have rather seamless transfers to the trains.

That is decades away in the west end. Maybe Orleans will have it soon but the trains are still rather unreliable, capacity might be an issue and the downtown stations seem to take forever to escape.

The 95 was the most reliable bus. You just waited for it.

 

[Masked]

The 95 was the most reliable bus. You just waited for it.

But so packed and so uncomfortable. I'd regularly get sick on the stretch from St Laurent to the Rideau Centre in the winter time being unable to see out the steamed up windows.

 

[Stylizer1]

But so packed and so uncomfortable. I'd regularly get sick on the stretch from St Laurent to the Rideau Centre in the winter time being unable to see out the steamed up windows.

but the next one was 2-3 minutes behind

 

[Golden_Jet]

regardless it still won't be as efficient as the transit system.

Not the current system, my wife is about one hour and 40 minutes each way, on the days she goes in. Usually most days, gets a notice that bus XX is canceled, which adds another 30 minutes.

 

[Loach]

Make this Top Gear and I'm down.

 

[OttawaSenators11]

I want large parking lots next to the arena rather it’s downtown or somewhere else.

I’m fine staying in Kanata long-term if it can’t be accomplished( just upgrade the jumbotron).

Depending on public transit is silly and a recipe for disaster.

 

[Masked]

Depending on public transit is silly and a recipe for disaster.

Works just fine for MSG.

 

[OttawaSenators11]

Works just fine for MSG.

That’s great never worked here and based on past evidence it won’t.

It all needs to be rebuilt for stability buses are slow and the trains go down way too often.

 

[Stylizer1]

Works just fine for MSG.

and it's 6 subway lines within 2-8 blocks?

 

[Relapsing]

I want large parking lots next to the arena rather it’s downtown or somewhere else.

Well that shortens to list to some of the (IMO) least desirable options.

I’m fine staying in Kanata long-term if it can’t be accomplished( just upgrade the jumbotron).

The likely outcome if parking fields are a high priority item for the Ownership Group.

Depending on public transit is silly and a recipe for disaster.

Public transit will always be part of the mix of how people get to games. There's no getting around that. The percentage of people attending games using transit will vary from one potential site to another.

While any of the downtown locations doesn't offer what you're looking for, I think it's easy to underestimate the impact a central location has on improving the variety of ways that people will attend games: Vehicle, LRT, Bus, Uber, and Walking. The current location only offers Vehicle, Bus, and a very expensive Uber.

 

[Nac Mac Feegle]

Public transit is great when you have easy access to it and a destination that isn't far from a station, when I worked downtown 2 mins from a stop, it made zero sense to pay twice as much for a parking pass to save me the maybe 10 min walk from my house the the transit way (I could catch a local bus to the connection but I preferred getting the walk in), and maybe I'd save 10 mins of commute.

The thing is, I made a conscious decision to buy a house that had good transit options, I had no connections to worry about, just hopped on a bus, and got of at my stop. The people who complain most about transit are the ones that are not working or living along the major routes, so not really your situation it seems. I will say that when they moved my office to the other side of town, busing became unrealistic. I went from a 30-35 min commute with no transfers, to what is now a 1h30 - 2h commute with two transfers. I'm not complaining that OC transpo doesn't serve my needs, because I choose to live where I live and choose not to find a close place to work, but the fact that the train starts at blair and ends at bayview adds two transfers to a trip that the old 95 would have done without a transfer. Thankfully the extensions should help with that.

.

Getting rid of the 95 is perhaps the dumbest thing OC Transpo has ever done. That route was just about the best route for every situation in the east end of town. Being able to go from Place to St Laurent to Rideau and beyond on one bus was fantastic.


On another note...where you live isn't always a choice. A lot of place along major routes cost a premium for that convenience. Not everyone has the heavy pockets to afford that, and are very limited in their options (which are mostly horrible around Ottawa).

 

[Tnuoc Alucard]

But people's work downtown is on the LRT line yet something like 80-90% of workers use their car.

These numbers can be off a bit, but I keep seeing that 90% of Canadians or North Americans commute by car. I'm assume it's a bit higher rurally(probably almost 100%) while maybe being closer to 80-85% in the cities giving a 90% overall.

So if ~80 of people would rather take their car downtown in much worse traffic(100k+ ppl) than take the light rail, why would this reverse for a hockey game?

If anything, people would be more likely to take the longer transit during a long 8-9 hour day compared to a shorter 3 hour event because of the percentage of time...(Like how people say "if I have to drive several hours to go to the cottage, I don't wanna go for the day, I want to spend a few nights"

Remember,it's not that the sens have to provide all this parking, but the parking will be available to meet demand around the arena via 3rd party with a 5-10 min walk.

You are correct about the percent of people who commute to downtown, to work, and use a private vehicle…. And after work, they would have a choice, depending on how far they work from the Arena, and access to public transit. I would suggest many would leave their vehicle parked where it is, and take a short ride on public transit to the Arena, rather than pay for parking, and then drive closer to the Arena and search out and pay for parking at a closer lot.

But people who NOW live in areas far from the current location of the Arena, probably have much fewer options, and the best one is to drive….. but once they are now much closer to a Lebreton Arena, other options are much more likely to be chosen, transit, walk, Uber and whatever…and with fewer on site parking spots would push them towards not driving . I can only speak for my self, and live in the South Keys area, and my private vehicle is the best option to head to the CTC, whereas I would definitely use public transit to get to Lebreton, as it will be more convenient and cheaper than .driving and finding parking nearby.

Now according to Stats Can, roughly 20% of the downtown workforce, use public transit to get to and from work downtown….. about 20% of residents use public transit, that would equate to roughly 203,490 people. However, this figure includes all residents, not just the employed workforce. The actual number of public service employees who commute by transit would be a subset of this total.…. So that is a large pool of the population that even if 5% of them attended a games, that would at the least half fill the Arena… and I think I am being conservative.

General Commuting Trends in Ottawa​

According to the 2016 Census, Ottawa–Gatineau residents predominantly commute by car:

• 70.8% of workers used a car, truck, or van to commute.
• 19.4% utilized public transit.
• 6.8% walked, and 2.1% cycled to work. Statistics Canada+1Statistics Canada+1

Specifically, on the Ontario side of Ottawa:

• 68.0% commuted by car.
• 21.2% used public transit.
• 7.6% walked, and 2.2% cycled.

 

[jbeck5]

I think you are assuming the best case scenario like being the first person out of the building and making all of the lights after the game. From lebreton to Innes/Portabelo on the best commute is at least 20-25 minutes.

I don't live that far into Orleans. Would take 5-10 just to get to portabello.

I'm more Innes/Orleans. Fly down Innes and you're at the split before most of Orleans even gets on the 174 at place dorleans or Jeanne Darc or trim.

 

[jbeck5]

Do they?

I'd say the end of day downtown rush hour goes from about 3:30 (????) to about 6:00pm or maybe even 6:30. That's far different than the thong of people that empty out of the arena immediately after the final buzzer.

To be fair about my complaints about driving downtown -- many days are okay, I get home in about 20 minutes. But if there's any kind of snarl up then it becomes gridlock and my commute becomes 45 minutes to an hour. So it's those occasional bad days make me try to avoid it altogether.

But the underlying reason for that gridlock is going to be true after a game. All the streets that will feed outwards (Scott St, O'Connor, Bronson, Gladstone, Carling, Parkdale, Churchill) are just not high capacity streets. Too many lights, too many cross walks, too narrow.

It doesn't though. It's mostly between 4-530.

When I leave work at 5, the parking garage is 90% empty. Most have already left before 5.

To be fair, those days exist with oc transpo too. Funny story. My buddy who takes the bus appeared on the front page of the newspaper TWICE in a few months looking all pissed off in a crowd of 100s of people waiting for buses to replace the rail that wasn't working.

The hope would be that those lights could be green for the most part at this time of the night.

Also part of what makes gridlock is that the cars leaving, are blocked by cars ahead...but the rest of the area will be empty, so nothing will be slowing down the first cars out like a normal day of commuting does. Should allow for more flow. Normally, even if you're beating the rush out of the downtown core towards the highway, the highway is already bumper to bumper from people getting on from all over the city, which makes things stop to a crawl. Those feeder streets to the highway are stopped because they can't get on the highway fast enough because it's blocked. This wouldn't be the case after a sens game. Once you get on the highway, it should be fast flowing with nothing ahead blocking you. The amount of people would only be like 10% of what a normal commute looks like. Will be breeze. You might have congestion the first few blocks around the arena, but that's why if you're smart, you'll park a few blocks away and can briskly walk/jog to your car and get in where traffic is thinner and then get on the highway and fly to your suburb because 10pm traffic is non existent in the Ottawa core most nights lol

 

[Loach]

The GCP has a bus that runs to games. I imagine more places will do that if the arena is down town. More places will have small packages of tickets to give away to customers too.

 

[JD1]

The phased approach to building the train lines really made a terrible first impression of what LRT can be, it doesn't help that imo the express bus setup we had was actually really convenient, so we went from something that was actually a very good solution to the moment but was going to run into problems as the city grew, to a really poor iteration of what LRT could be where the vast majority of commuters got a downgrade in service.

People would have still complained if we started from day one with trains running from Trim all the way to Moodie and beyond, but I really don't like the idea of everyone east of Blair all coming to transfer at one station.

I disagree with that. The unreliability of the trains turned the people away from it. Public transit needs to be reliable and predictable. OC isn't.

I stopped taking the bus in 2008 when they had that strike. Prior to that, daily user in and out of downtown. Post strike I kept driving and my neighbours all told me the service went to hell.

I agree the phased approach wasn't great but the first few years the service was completely unreliable. Day to day you didn't know if the train would actually run.

 

[JD1]

You are correct about the percent of people who commute to downtown, to work, and use a private vehicle…. And after work, they would have a choice, depending on how far they work from the Arena, and access to public transit. I would suggest many would leave their vehicle parked where it is, and take a short ride on public transit to the Arena, rather than pay for parking, and then drive closer to the Arena and search out and pay for parking at a closer lot.

But people who NOW live in areas far from the current location of the Arena, probably have much fewer options, and the best one is to drive….. but once they are now much closer to a Lebreton Arena, other options are much more likely to be chosen, transit, walk, Uber and whatever…and with fewer on site parking spots would push them towards not driving . I can only speak for my self, and live in the South Keys area, and my private vehicle is the best option to head to the CTC, whereas I would definitely use public transit to get to Lebreton, as it will be more convenient and cheaper than .driving and finding parking nearby.

Now according to Stats Can, roughly 20% of the downtown workforce, use public transit to get to and from work downtown….. about 20% of residents use public transit, that would equate to roughly 203,490 people. However, this figure includes all residents, not just the employed workforce. The actual number of public service employees who commute by transit would be a subset of this total.…. So that is a large pool of the population that even if 5% of them attended a games, that would at the least half fill the Arena… and I think I am being conservative.

General Commuting Trends in Ottawa​

According to the 2016 Census, Ottawa–Gatineau residents predominantly commute by car:

• 70.8% of workers used a car, truck, or van to commute.
• 19.4% utilized public transit.
• 6.8% walked, and 2.1% cycled to work. Statistics Canada+1Statistics Canada+1

Specifically, on the Ontario side of Ottawa:

• 68.0% commuted by car.
• 21.2% used public transit.
• 7.6% walked, and 2.2% cycled.

So that data is from from the entire city I presume?

I think it would be different if you were looking at data commuting in and out of downtown. 2016 was well before the train. I would guess commuting in and out of downtown everyday, public transit was at least 50%

 

[Stylizer1]

I disagree with that. The unreliability of the trains turned the people away from it. Public transit needs to be reliable and predictable. OC isn't.

I stopped taking the bus in 2008 when they had that strike. Prior to that, daily user in and out of downtown. Post strike I kept driving and my neighbours all told me the service went to hell.

I agree the phased approach wasn't great but the first few years the service was completely unreliable. Day to day you didn't know if the train would actually run.

And now it's the buses turn to maybe not show up. I think a lot of this stems from the fact they laid off many drivers when the train came on line think their cost savings would be great.

 

[Stylizer1]

It doesn't though. It's mostly between 4-530.

When I leave work at 5, the parking garage is 90% empty. Most have already left before 5.

To be fair, those days exist with oc transpo too. Funny story. My buddy who takes the bus appeared on the front page of the newspaper TWICE in a few months looking all pissed off in a crowd of 100s of people waiting for buses to replace the rail that wasn't working.

The hope would be that those lights could be green for the most part at this time of the night.

Also part of what makes gridlock is that the cars leaving, are blocked by cars ahead...but the rest of the area will be empty, so nothing will be slowing down the first cars out like a normal day of commuting does. Should allow for more flow. Normally, even if you're beating the rush out of the downtown core towards the highway, the highway is already bumper to bumper from people getting on from all over the city, which makes things stop to a crawl. Those feeder streets to the highway are stopped because they can't get on the highway fast enough because it's blocked. This wouldn't be the case after a sens game. Once you get on the highway, it should be fast flowing with nothing ahead blocking you. The amount of people would only be like 10% of what a normal commute looks like. Will be breeze. You might have congestion the first few blocks around the arena, but that's why if you're smart, you'll park a few blocks away and can briskly walk/jog to your car and get in where traffic is thinner and then get on the highway and fly to your suburb because 10pm traffic is non existent in the Ottawa core most nights lol

next time you go into work lets see some time stamps at key locations. At 5pm the Queensway is bumper to bumper. Show us some of that turbo driving.

 

[Golden_Jet]

next time you go into work lets see some time stamps at key locations. At 5pm the Queensway is bumper to bumper. Show us some of that turbo driving.

Doesn’t seem to matter what time of day you drive 417, you’re going to get stuck where they change the sound barriers for last 5 years. That will back up a long ways.

 

[milkbag]

Getting rid of the 95 is perhaps the dumbest thing OC Transpo has ever done. That route was just about the best route for every situation in the east end of town. Being able to go from Place to St Laurent to Rideau and beyond on one bus was fantastic.


On another note...where you live isn't always a choice. A lot of place along major routes cost a premium for that convenience. Not everyone has the heavy pockets to afford that, and are very limited in their options (which are mostly horrible around Ottawa).

getting rid of the 95 so the youth of today won't get to experience the Friday/Saturday 3am 95 is as big of a cultural blow as shutting down 99 Rideau St.