After a five-year delay, a joint interprovincial study looking into the integration of bus transit between Ottawa and Gatineau could start at the end of this month.
The study, which was initially recommended in 2003 as a follow-up to Ottawa’s Rapid Transit Expansion study, is a collaborative effort between the City of Ottawa, the National Capital Commission and Gatineau’s Société de Transport de L’Outaouais.
According to Kathryn Keyes, a spokesperson for the NCC, the capital commission is in the process of choosing a consultant to conduct the study. This consultant will be selected by November 14, she says.
Once it gets underway, the results should take one year to be released.
The NCC took the lead of the study at the end of last year.
David Jeanes, a local engineer and president of Transport 2000, an advocacy group for sustainable transportation says that he is disappointed that the study has taken so long to surface.
“The city cannot solve the downtown congestion problem without increased transit share across the [Macdonald-Cartier] bridge,” he says.
However, there is nothing in Ottawa’s Transportation Master Plan to ensure that this happens, Jeanes says.
The draft Transportation Master Plan was tabled earlier this month at a joint meeting of the transportation and transit committees.
Jeanes says the city is depending on the interprovincial study to provide recommendations to improve transit between the two cities.
However, it was pushed back to shift the focus to north-south transit in Ottawa, he says.
“The study must happen,” he says. “They are letting it slide.”
Pat Scrimgeour, manager of transit service design with the city, says that it took a long time for all the agencies to agree on how the study should be done; hence the reason for the delay.
“The City of Ottawa has not been slowing it down,” he says.
Scrimgeour says that the recommendations from the interprovincial study could be included in the master plan for transportation in the future.