As Ottawa takes decisive steps toward giving itself a downtown subway, it is fascinating to find that this is actually the fourth time that plans for grade-separated downtown transit have been proposed. This is typical of growing cities that have had to tackle such a major investment in transit. Montreal, for instance, first proposed a subway in 1910. It would be over half a century before the métro finally opened, in 1964. Likewise, Toronto’s first subway plan dates back to 1909. It took until 1954 to see the first trains roll. Even cities like Paris first discussed subways as early as 1854, and had to wait several decades until the first line was put in service in 1900.
In Ottawa, the first subway plan dates back to 1915. In a report to Parliament, the Holt Commission noted the severe congestion of Sparks Street and arteries leading up to it, including Bank and Elgin Streets. As the drawing below illustrates, it recommended placing streetcars in a subway between Bronson and Rideau Streets, with southbound lines on Bank and Elgin. The portals would’ve been at the escarpment on the western edge, the Rideau Street intersection with Sussex at the eastern edge, and at about Laurier Avenue for the southern edges of the Bank and Elgin lines.
The Holt Report wrote:
“The policy of adopting subway construction is for the purpose of freeing the streets in the downtown centre entirely of street-car business. It is proposed that the transportation lines be brought to the perimeter of the central section of the city above ground, and there enter subways which shall extend across the heart of the city. This principle is being adopted universally to relieve congestion on narrow downtown streets.”
Holt’s subway was by no means the mass rapid transit systems of larger cities or anything resembling today’s LRT subway plan. Streetcar subways were proposed in response to growing vehicular chaos on central city streets as a way to segregate regular streetcars from surface street operation. Boston’s subway started out as a streetcar subway in 1897; today it is part of the MBTA’s Green Line. Before it was incorporated into a longer network of subways, Boston’s streetcars operated in the downtown via the subway and then provided on-street service with regular stops. This lasted well into the 1950’s.
The Holt plan was never implemented. With Canada at war and the destruction of Parliament by fire in 1916, the government was distracted away from following up on the report’s recommendations. Only a few of its elements were picked up in later plans and survive today, notably the strong building edge along Elgin Street, with its uniform cornice lines framing the view of the War Memorial.
It would take another 54 years before underground rapid transit would again be seriously considered in Ottawa. In 1969, ten years after the abandonment of streetcars, the Ottawa area found itself having grown past the half-million population that the 1950 Gréber Plan had forecast for the year 2000. This rapid growth, along with the decentralization of employment and systematic segregation of land uses recommended by Gréber, made car traffic rise by several multiples over the increase in population. Again, congestion became a serious issue and a Washington, DC consultant, Philip Hammer, was commissioned to prepare a plan for the downtown core.
In 1969, Hammer released the Ottawa Central Area Study for the City, the NCC and the Ontario Department of Highways. The Hammer Report was premised on Ottawa reaching a metropolitan population of 1,492,520 by 1996. The report’s main conclusion is that “the existing street system is not adequate to serve the projected future development and that the alternatives worthy of future consideration were the freeway-oriented, transit-oriented and balanced systems”, a trio of alternatives discussed at length in the report.
This being the age of freeway construction, one of the choices advanced by Hammer is an all-freeway solution to Ottawa’s congestion dilemma. The so-called freeway-oriented scenario called for freeways to be extended into downtown from the Queensway by a new King Edward Expressway, which would have required the demolition of all buildings between King Edward Avenue and Nelson Street north to the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge, and a Lemieux Island Expressway, which would use the Prince of Wales bridge to cross into what is now Gatineau. This scenario would, among other things, require the creation of 40,000 new parking spaces downtown by 1990.
The transit-oriented scenario called for the construction of a subway between Lebreton Flats and Sandy Hill, under Queen and Besserer Streets, extending eastward into Vanier and westward to Nepean as a surface rail line. The “maximum transit” scenario would’ve seen rail service reach St. Laurent Shopping Centre in the east and Barrhaven in the southwest, while the “balanced system” had rail service stop at Montreal Road and St. Laurent in the east, and Merivale and Meadowlands in the southwest.
Among Hammer’s other proposals, he envisioned a continuous urban fabric linking the downtowns of Ottawa and Hull over the Portage Bridge, “to promote developments that will link the North Shore in Quebec to the Central Area in Ontario, symbolizing the integration of the two dominant cultures of Canada.”
Some of the other recommendations found in the Hammer Report were implemented shortly after. Downtown building height restrictions had been capped at 150 feet until the 1960’s; Hammer proposed maximum-density zoning through Floor Space Index and angular planes to allow for taller highrise buildings downtown while protecting the views to, and predominance of, the Parliament Buildings on the skyline. He also proposed using zoning to restrict the extension of commercial office development south into Centretown. Notably, he advocated for Rideau Street to retain a central role in regional retailing by establishing a major indoor mall. With interesting foresight, he saw Richmond Road in Westboro becoming a major retail corridor in the 1990’s. And he also called for a Ceremonial Route to link major federal buildings and landmarks, as well as a Convention Centre replacing the old Union Station building at Rideau and Sussex, steps away from the facility that is currently under reconstruction.
Hammer’s subway was never built, but neither were his freeways. In fact, his Plan gave rise to Ottawa’s own freeway revolts, leading to the creation of community associations such as Action Sandy Hill, which formed to (successfully) defeat the King Edward Expressway. As for rapid transit, the decisive nail in the subway’s coffin was an updated population projection issued by the National Capital Commission a couple of years later in which the area’s growth was revised downward significantly. With the onset of a recession in the early 1970’s, large public expenditures were put on the back burner and Hammer’s subway quickly evaporated from Ottawa’s to-do list.
However, the need for rapid transit did not go away. In fact, the new Ottawa-Carleton Regional government (formed in 1969) was quickly seized with the problem and, in 1976, released the Rapid Transit Appraisal Study. This study analyzed a variety of options including a metro and an LRT system, concluding that for its size at the time, Ottawa wasn’t yet ready for rail rapid transit – but would be within two or three decades. The Transitway was born from that report. It was a made-in-Ottawa solution, different from the route taken by Calgary (surface LRT) and Edmonton (LRT with downtown subway) in that it called for the creation of grade-separated, high-capacity bus corridors designed for conversion to rail, starting with the outer edges of the system with the anticipation of downtown grade-separation at later stages. Basically, the Transitway solution was designed to “groom” the city for rail rapid transit by building ridership along with population growth until such time as rail became justified to meet transportation needs.
That “later stage” came in the late 1980’s in the form of a proposal to grade-separate the Transitway through downtown with a bus tunnel. At the time, the Regional government presented a study in which two main options were considered: one was to elevate the Transitway above Albert and Slater streets; the other was for a twin bus tunnels under both those streets.
The elevated option was rejected for a variety of reasons, none least because of its profoundly disruptive effect on the north-south vistas to the Parliamentary precinct and several other national monuments and landmarks, as the illustration below shows (a view on Elgin Street looking north to the War Memorial):
The twin-tunnel was carried forward as the recommended way to go. It would have featured four underground bus stations (Bay, Bank, Metcalfe and Rideau), with the alignment then following the existing Transitway south toward Campus station in an open cut that gently rose above ground.
Two things killed this project, both political. At the time, as is the case today, the debate over the future of rapid transit was emotionally charged and funding was a major issue. Then-Ottawa Mayor Jim Durrell, during a media scrum, made the tactical mistake of letting his guard down, impatiently remarking that “costs were irrelevant”. Durrell, for all his visionary leadership, did not properly read the public concern about the money that this project was going to cost. His main argument that the tunnel was a city-building initiative and that it was being designed for conversion to rail, was instantly lost with that comment. The media had a field day with his statement.
The other undoing of the Transitway tunnel was a statistical tidbit which claimed that the tunnel would save commuters an average of about four minutes in their crossing of downtown. This was grossly taken out of context by media columnists eager to exploit the burning controversy over the project. The time savings may have been an “average” of four minutes, but during peak times buses were already experiencing severe delays going through the core. Regardless, for the media, hundreds of millions of dollars for four minutes became a mantra. For better or for worse, the bus tunnel project was slowly and painfully put to death.
Any large and growing city that embarks on a rapid transit project of any magnitude will experience controversy. Ottawa is not new to this, as were all other major cities that have built subways or rapid rail transit lines. The stakes are high: the scale of the investment involved in such a project, the structuring power of rail transit, and the implications for real estate, retail and scores of other interests including which communities will get the line and which will get it first, all translate into debates that by necessity are divisive, often bitter and extreme, and all too often play to the common lowest denominator (costs, taxes, “impacts”, etc.).
In our current LRT debate, it’s worth remembering that the original Chiarelli plan called for a north-south line to serve the new community of Riverside South, thereby theoretically avoiding the need for massive roadbuilding to link that new suburb to the rest of the city. The main reason that project got killed was that larger, more established suburbs were not first in line for the transit upgrade. The current plan correctly starts with downtown as the main element of the plan and its first phase, but also starts out by serving the heavily-populated east and west ends, in that order. There still is a north-south line, but it only gets built in later phases.
Still, one only has to look at any city that has matured enough to take the step forward and build a system to see the evidence of how a city can be transformed. One would not dream of Toronto without its subway. We also quickly forget that Toronto wasn’t much larger than Ottawa at the time it started building its first line. One also has to look at European cities that are sometimes smaller than Ottawa is today (Lille, Bilbao) and have built a metro or extensive LRT systems, to understand how rail rapid transit really is the only way to structure growth.
Fourth time lucky for Ottawa? The current iteration of an underground system through downtown has not been without its share of birthing pains. In fact, we are still at the onset of labour, undergoing severe contractions. But the baby must be allowed to come into the world.
There remains in the media today a vocal faction arguing that LRT service can function at-grade. Cost, again, is the main reason invoked in trying to kill the tunnel. As the City proceeds through the debate, it remains vitally important to demonstrate that a surface LRT system can only accomplish so much. One look at downtown today during peak hour should be enough to show most reasonable people that, be it buses or trains, the amount of people moving through the core is such that any surface operation dooms the system to delays and unreliability, both fatal to establishing transit as the quicker and more convenient option. If we pay for a surface LRT system for downtown, how long will it be before we are faced with the same congestion dilemma? Ten years, tops? Why, in other words, would a city spend so much money on a stop-gap solution when it can give itself infrastructure that will last centuries and fix, once and for all, the problem of slow transit through the core?
There are also bizarre arguments to the effect that the tunnel’s hidden agenda is to help cars move quicker through downtown and therefore, this is really a car-centric plan. Again, the argument must be vigorously defeated with sound reasoning. A surface operation means that people have to wait outside. A subway means weather-protected stations. A surface operation curtails the potential of a high frequency service. A subway offers the potential for two-minute trains. And this is really the key factor in expressing the significant upgrade in service that the LRT subway will give Ottawans. In other words, the current subway plan is a commuter-oriented plan. It will make transit faster and friendlier, a pleasure to use – not a dutiful token investment that really changes nothing and leaves the car as the fastest, more comfortable way to move around.
Right now, people have to wait outside for their bus (which may be a 95, or may also be one of the dozens of express routes that mingle with the 90’s series lines). There are also rural routes and out-of-town transit companies that mingle with the 35’s, 62’s and 77’s of the world that take commuters from downtown to dozens of specific suburban communities through the Transitway. Miss your bus and you’re waiting –outside– even longer.
With an LRT subway, every train is your train. People will take the train to a station that then becomes the main transfer point, so the distribution of crowds takes place outside downtown. With a high-frequency service, people’s schedule will revolve not around the downtown departure time (which is rendered meaningless by congestion), but around the departure times at the transfer station. Those times will have a much greater chance of being exact, since buses leaving transfer stations won’t be stuck in downtown traffic.
Ottawa is about to embark on the most exhilarating transit project this generation will know. It is a rare privilege to live here in these times and to see the city reinvent itself in such a forward-looking way. The only thing our children will ask us is, “what took you so long to do this?”
Photo by Oran Viriyincy