Tunnel from NAC still possible
LRT deal requires estimate, rough plan
A walkway between the city’s new rail system and the National Arts Centre is still a possibility, according to the newly released contract with the consortium hired to build the rail line, two months after city council was told such a connection was impossible.
The document says the Rideau Transit Group, which won the $3.8-billion contract to build and maintain the rail line from Tunney’s Pasture to Blair Road through downtown, has to come up with rough plans to link the “Downtown East” station at Queen and O’Connor with an existing pedestrian tunnel under Elgin Street, along with a preliminary cost estimate. On a month’s notice, RTG has to be ready to discuss how it would work with the NAC and where it would fit into the rail project’s fiveyear construction timetable.
Whether and how to connect the arts centre with the city’s marquee new rapidtransit system has been one of the most contentious parts of the planning since the city decided to pursue the project in the first place. Last spring, the city unilaterally moved the “Rideau” station, which had had a direct connection to the arts centre — and a prominent entrance on Confederation Square — to the northeast corner of the Rideau Centre on the other side of the Rideau Canal.
Mayor Jim Watson refused to contemplate undoing the move, but after an outcry the city agreed to look at shifting the Downtown East station closer to the arts centre, or at least building a direct indoor connection between them.
Part of the point of the new rail system is to make tranPart of the point of the new rail system is to make transit more of a way of life for a wider range of Ottawans, and making it easy to take the train to a swish gala at the NAC would probably help.
No can do, came the report in December. The station can’t be moved, and a tunnel wouldn’t work:
“It was determined by the NAC that such a connection cannot occur through the existing tunnel under Elgin Street to the NAC parking structure,” the planners reported in writing. “[I]t was determined that a direct connection was cost prohibitive.”
Instead, they said, they would look into the possibility of some sort of covered walkway along the Mackenzie King Bridge. That would turn the two-block trip from the Downtown East station into a fourblock indirect haul, half of it through the mall and including multiple escalator rides.
The city couldn’t explain the discrepancy by the end of the day Friday. The walkway over the bridge isn’t mentioned in the contract, though building it probably wouldn’t be part of the rail work.
Much, but not all, of the contract was released after Watson, RTG’s representatives and other politicians (including new Premier Kathleen Wynne) signed a ceremonial version of the agreement at the mayor’s office. City lawyer Rick O’Connor said his staff and RTG’s lawyers are still scrubbing some of the contract’s schedules for private details, but expect to have the rest out within a couple of weeks.
Many more such ceremonial events are in store as RTG gets to work. The contract says the consortium and the city will work on a steady schedule of groundbreakings, unveilings and ribbon-cuttings — for the Hwy. 417 widening part of the project and the maintenance yard RTG will build, for stations, for the arrival of the first trains, for the first test runs, and on and on — for “the public to appreciate elements of the System and the Highway Work.”
Aside from those staged events, though, RTG’s job is to shut up and dig.
Despite the city’s cancellation of a previous light-rail contract, this one doesn’t include terrible penalties in the unlikely event Ottawa wants to get out of this one.
RTG and its members are entitled to be compensated for a range of out-of-pocket expenses and lost profits, as is normal.
That said, given that the consortium needs to borrow $300 million to finance the project because the contract is structured to delay payments and keep the consortium invested over time, those could be a lot more substantial than the $36.7 million the city had to pay would-be builder Siemens over the last cancellation.