Later this year, as part of the City’s regular review of its Master Transportation Plan, Council will be asked to consider the next steps in expanding Ottawa’s transit network. As it stands, the plan points to a Stage 3 extension of the Light Rail Transit lines, spending at least $6.5 billion to reach Kanata, Stittsville, and Barrhaven.
Light Rail made a lot of sense when we were looking at ways to move people in and out of the downtown without having to deal with congestion. Many of us will remember the hours spent sitting on a cross-town bus that was stuck in a traffic jam at Albert and Bay. Line 1, with its below-grade tunnel, skips through the mess of cars and trucks.
Not a unique situation, I know: we’re seeing increased congestion on many suburban roads, too, and it’s one of the causes of late and cancelled buses on places like Baseline Road, Merivale, Carling, and elsewhere. And if we don’t create a viable alternative for people moving, it will only get worse.
Looking ahead, the City’s Official Plan states that 50% of all new homes will be built in the existing urban area. Practically speaking, it’s inside the Greenbelt. This means a dramatic transformation for the mature neighbourhoods that ring the urban core. The City is already reviewing and approving high rises that will bring thousands more people to the Baseline corridor with no capacity to move them efficiently.
That’s where the proposed Baseline Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project comes in. Under development for over 10 years, the Baseline BRT would transform Baseline Road to create a pair of dedicated bus lanes down the centre, with new transit stations at major intersections. It would also install wider sidewalks, better pedestrian crossings, and bike lanes.
Dedicated bus lanes will have the same effect as the LRT’s tunnel – allowing buses to move past congestion and keep to their schedules. It will also connect to the LRT at key stations such as Heron, Algonquin and Bayshore.
The current plan is for the Baseline BRT to run 13.8 km from Heron to Bayshore, but several councillors have wondered whether it would be practical to extend it further west to Stittsville and Kanata South through Robertson Road, which are also projected to see explosive growth over the next 20 years.
And with a price tag at around $400 million in 2022 dollars, the BRT is wildly affordable compared to the cost of rail extensions. Through this project, the City can show the Provincial and Federal governments that we have a practical, reliable, and economical plan to move people through our city, right now.
Better yet, it’s a good way to demonstrate to residents that transit can once again be reliable, predictable, and efficient, and draw people out of their cars and back to public transportation for the trips that make sense. I think, given our history, that residents are bringing what I’m calling a healthy skepticism to all things public transit in Ottawa. College Ward is no exception, and I have received several inquiries on the subject.
The first project associated with the Baseline Rapid Transit Corridor is the intersection improvement coming to Baseline and Greenbank this spring, for which the City has been reserving funds for several years since its initial identification in 2013. When my office held an open house for this project back in 2024, residents expressed their surprise. How could a project, planned as early as 2013, still be relevant today after COVID and changing travel patterns turned public transit upside down? Could a single intersection improvement make any difference if the rest of the corridor remains unfunded?
It was important for the City to provide myself and residents of College Ward assurances that the Baseline BRT still had the quantitative underpinning to support its construction. In a recent webinar with over 250 attendees from across the City, we learned that route 88 is one of the healthiest rebounds in transit routes across the city post-COVID. We have the funds in place to do the intersection upgrade, and the City is confident the upgrade still improves service along the corridor without securing the entire project first.
And for those who are concerned about the potential time savings being worth the squeeze, currently pegged at 11 minutes through the Baseline corridor, I would suggest that there’s a larger city-building view to take with that. For sure, it’s 11 minutes per person, which is a multiplier across riders: let’s say 10,000 people a day by 2031. But the impact on reliability for those 10,000 riders to make their connections creates a knock-on effect for more people to comfortably choose transit for those trips that suit them. The City needs to right this toppled apple cart of transit economics. One of the levers is increased ridership. We need to improve service now, and that doesn’t happen by betting it all on the support of other levels of government for Stage 3 LRT.
Baseline BRT is only the first of several possible but similar affordable projects, including a Carling BRT, Greenbank BRT to Barrhaven, Cumberland BRT, etc., that can make public transit a useful option for residents again. I think it’s time that the City cuts its losses with Stage 3 LRT and pivots the Transportation Master Plan to prioritize bus rapid transit, starting with Baseline. By doing so, we significantly improve the Long-Range Financial Plan for OC Transpo, we deliver it using a technology that is reliable, and we show up as a creative partner with other levels of government. We might further modify our existing plans to think about ‘BRT lite’ designs for transit priority, decreasing our costs to build. We can do better to deliver transit in tandem with intensification which understandably gives current residents anxiety about what a car-dependent system will do for their experiences in congestion. People want to get where they are going, faster. Bus rapid transit can make that happen faster.
I’m looking forward to this discussion at the Transportation Master Plan meetings this spring and to restoring the public’s faith in transit.
By Laine Johnson
