Sandy Hill truck tunnel study sneaks into transportation plan

Link between 417, Macdonald-Cartier Bridge added to long-term city blueprint

The idea of a truck tunnel connecting Highway 417 and the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge to Gatineau needs a proper engineering study, city council’s transportation committee agreed Friday after a daylong debate on its $4-billion master plan for roads, transit, sidewalks and bike routes.

The committee approved the plan largely unchanged from the way it was first presented in October, with light-rail lines going west to Bayshore, southwest to Baseline and east to Place d’Orléans and an OTrain extension southeast to Riverside South.

It signed off, too, on an earlier decision by the city’s transit commission to extend busways well into Kanata (but short of the Canadian Tire Centre), as far west as Terry Fox Drive and as far north as Solandt Road.

And on a footbridge across the Rideau River between Somerset and Donald streets, a new pedestrian and cycling deck on the old Prince of Wales bridge to Gatineau and — a little later — a footbridge across the Rideau Canal near Lansdowne Park.

If something goes wrong, or really, really well, with plans for either of the first two footbridges and there’s money freed up, the Lansdowne bridge would be built sooner, thanks to a move by Capital Coun. David Chernushenko.

Other councillors got tweaks to move a couple of road projects up so they’ll be done sooner, particularly a widening of Prince of Wales Drive around Hunt Club Road. Coun. Mathieu Fleury got new sidewalks put on the to-do list for Des Pères Blancs Avenue and Brant Street. Coun.

Allan Hubley got the committee to agree to devote any unexpected savings from work on Old Richmond Road to improvements on Hope Side Road, which feeds into it.

‘This is to say, technically, is a tunnel feasible? It’s been discounted several times and we think we need to take a good hard look at it.’

NANCY SCHEPERS

Deputy city manager

But the little manoeuvre that might have the farthest-reaching effect was from Fleury: a motion that would have the city approach the provincial government about sharing the cost of a study of a massive truck tunnel under Sandy Hill and Lowertown.

It’s a long, long way from happening. It’s just the germ of an idea at the moment.

“This is to say, technically, is a tunnel feasible?” said deputy city manager Nancy Schepers, who supports the idea of a study. “It’s been discounted several times and we think we need to take a good hard look at it.”

A tunnel would take trucks off King Edward Avenue and the streets that connect it to the 417, which they dominate.

The transportation plan says that route should stop being a truck route but the city has no idea how it’ll happen, especially since the provincial government killed the idea of a new east-side bridge earlier this year.

A tunnel is, at least in theory, a solution. People have kicked around prices well into the billions but nobody knows for sure what it would cost.

Studying it would cost about $750,000 and give us some better information, Schepers said.

The transportation master plan gets an update every five years; this version is to take Ottawa to 2031, though it spends much of the money the city expects to have all the way out to 2048.

The bulk of the rail work, by far the most expensive aspect of the plan, would be done by 2023, if the federal and provincial governments are willing to contribute $975 million each.

The plan has now been through all the committees that need to approve it. City council takes one last vote Nov. 26.