On the right track
Route changes leave residents still concerned light-rail stations planned for Westboro could lead to overdevelopment.
Moving a planned light-rail line mostly off the park between Richmond Road and Byron Avenue is a good idea but it doesn’t deal with residents’ worries that new rail stations will lead to overdevelopment in Westboro, Highland Park, McKellar Park and Carlingwood, says the spokeswoman for Neighbours for Smart Western Rail.
The group was formed after it became clear the city was focusing its planning for a western extension of the downtown LRT line on the “Richmond-Byron corridor,” the former tramway that’s been turned into a long, skinny park along Richmond Road.
Neeta McMurtry said she was pleased to read in the Citizen on Friday that the city is about to propose two variations of the route that would run mostly through the park along the Ottawa River just to the north, instead of depending on the Byron Park, but her satisfaction is limited.
“Is it an improvement? It’s hard to say.
“I would like to say yes, but there’s an awful lot we just don’t know,” she said.
The president of McKellar Park’s community association, Bruce Bergen, agreed with the sentiment.
“I think it’s a good sign that it appears the city has heard that residents in the area that I live in have concerns about the routes that had been proposed,” he said in a separate interview. “The two new ones don’t appear to go through the middle of McKellar Park, but they may have impacts that are difficult to assess.”
Bergen hopes there will be more opportunities than that for residents to be heard. (Kitchissippi Coun. Katherine Hobbs has said she expects neighbourhood meetings will follow, though they haven’t been scheduled yet.)
Bergen is looking forward to an open house at City Hall on April 25 where more details are to be revealed. He lives on Mansfield Avenue, between Richmond Road and the Ottawa River, so the train would run half a block from his home on any of the routes.
There’s a lot of crossover between the community association and Neighbours for Smart Western Rail, whose efforts Bergen said he supports. McMurtry said her group’s concerns go beyond the path the trains eventually take through the neighbourhood. “There’s the routes and then there’s what the city would call transit-oriented development that goes with the routes.”
For the first phase of light rail, which began construction Friday with the groundbreaking for a trainyard on Belfast Road, city council has already approved those transitoriented development plans around three east-side stations. Near the current O-Train, St. Laurent and Cyrville Transitway stations, the city has rezoned commercial lots — many of them now holding strip malls, box stores and parking lots — for buildings as tall as 30 storeys.
As urban plans go, those were easy: owners saw the value of their properties skyrocket and most of the land is semi-industrial and close to Hwy. 417 so there’s nobody to really object. In the west, the new stations would be in residential areas, likely at Richmond Road and Cleary Avenue and at Richmond and New Orchard Avenue. The city formally figures that 600 metres is a reasonable distance to walk to a major transit station, and circles around those intersections would include huge swaths of single-family houses.
It’s not clear the city would want to rezone them for highrise development. But it’s also not clear that it wouldn’t. That whole question has been left out of something that’s been treated strictly as a transportation planning job, McMurtry said.
Richmond Road is already a big redevelopment zone, she pointed out, and she’s concerned overbuilding will strain city services. She once lived in an Edmonton neighbourhood where the sewers couldn’t handle a rush of new construction and sewage backwashed into her house.
“Why are we making an investment in a neighbourhood where development is already happening organically?” she asked. “Is this the right place to spend money like that?”
Any of the potential new rail lines is expected to cost about $1 billion. Neighbours for Smart Western Rail has argued that Carling Avenue to the south is a better rail route, but the city’s planners reject it for several reasons, including the difficulty of connecting a line along Carling to the line the city’s beginning to build between Tunney’s Pasture and Blair Road through downtown. Also, so many major north-south roads cross Carling that using it for rail without lethally obstructing traffic would mean building an elevated line, which the planners estimate would cost $2 billion.
“At the end of the day, there’s no evidence that shows that going over the park is necessary, given that there are other options,” McMurtry said. She lives close to the park from which McKellar Park draws its name, about midway between Byron and Carling.
Bergen echoed the sentiment: “I’m a little bit disappointed that the Carling option seems to have been taken off the table.” Both expect the open house at City Hall will be extremely well attended.
The National Capital Commission owns significant parts of the land the city would use for any of the four routes that would connect Tunney’s Pasture to Baseline station and its board is to get a look at the possibilities Wednesday.
After a period for public discussion, city council’s transportation committee is to choose one finalist in June.