By Cynthia Vukets
Bus congestion on the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge could be a thing of the past, as a joint study begins next year to improve public transportation between Ottawa and Gatineau.
The City of Ottawa, the National Capital Commission and Gatineau’s Societé de Transport de l’Outaouais will be collaborating to look into the way people commute across the Ottawa River. The three bodies are each contributing equal funding to find a better way for people to travel between Ottawa and Gatineau.
“The concept [for the study] in the downtown is to get a greater percentage of people making the trip in public transportation and not in cars,” says Peter Steacy, a program manager with the City of Ottawa’s transportation planning department. He says a new system could create a more efficient public transport system with fewer buses, meaning less congestion and pollution.
The report was originally commissioned in 2003 but has been postponed until now. “It more or less got stalled with the NCC,” says Steacy.
He says much of the delay was due to the fact that the NCC was supposed to take charge of the project, but was unable to do so because of funding problems.
The City of Ottawa has now had to step in to take the lead. The study is expected to take approximately two years to complete due to the complexity of the issues it will address, according to Steacy.
David Jeanes addressed the annual general meeting of the National Capital Commission on Nov. 21 regarding the study. Jeanes is a local engineer and president of Transport 2000, a public advocacy group concerned with sustainable transportation.
Jeanes urged the NCC to speed up the process to get the study underway. Inter-provincial transportation is most important between downtown Ottawa and downtown Gatineau, because government workers often live on one side of the river and commute to work on the other.
Jeanes says the study results will be even more critical if Gatineau goes ahead with the construction of a bus highway known as the “Rapibus” project.
Rapibus could increase bus traffic to Ottawa’s downtown core, because the improved public transport within Gatineau could encourage more Gatineau residents to commute to Ottawa by bus instead of car.
Jeanes says he believes the extra buses will create too much confusion. In his remarks to the National Capital Commission Jeanes suggested several alternatives.
He says extending rail transit across the Prince of Wales bridge, an unused rail bridge, and into downtown Gatineau would be a much more efficient way for commuters to cross the Ottawa River.
“The railway bridge isn’t being used at all and could be moving thousands of people an hour,” he says. An extended rail line could then easily connect to Gatineau’s busway.
Marie-Pierre Couture works for Agriculture Canada in Ottawa and lives in Gatineau. She takes the bus about three times a week, and says Jeane’s light rail proposal would be a big improvement.
“The train is fast, quiet and there is less waiting,” she says.
The current wait on buses to cross the river during peak hours discourages commuters from taking the bus; a quicker, easier way to cross the river would likely entice more people to use public transportation, according to Steacy..
Jeanes also suggests the study look into improving routes across the Chaudière and Macdonald-Cartier bridges, which are the busiest links.
“The Chaudière Bridge has a two-lane bottleneck crossing over to Gatineau and it’s totally congested.”
Another way he suggests taking pressure off the Chaudière crossing would be to create bus-only lanes on the six-lane Macdonald-Cartier Bridge.