Roundabout routes

City scraps plan to push STO buses off Sussex onto Lowertown street

The city is killing a plan to let dozens of Gatineau buses run along a residential street in Lowertown so that a reconstructed Sussex Drive wouldn’t be contaminated by a bus lane.

It’s the latest front in an ongoing war over the number of buses the Société de transport de l’Outaouais sends to Ottawa, often staging them on roads on the Ottawa side of the river so they can start their runs at particular times on Rideau Street. Many buses pause in an underpass behind the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Pearson Building after crossing the river on the Macdonald- Cartier Bridge and looping around Boteler Street and Sussex Drive.

They use a dedicated bus lane on Sussex to make the loop, but as part of the renovations to Sussex, that lane was to disappear.

The roadway is to get narrower, the sidewalks wider, and a new bike lane is to be added. The loss of the bus lane was expected to slow STO buses, so at the very busiest time at afternoon rush hour, the plan was that some would turn east on Boteler Street instead of west and head straight to a new roundabout instead of looping around on Sussex. They’d use Boteler for only a block, but it’s a stretch of road that includes a handful of houses and one big condo block built close to the street.

Residents were livid, giving the city’s planners an earful at a public meeting on the larger Sussex Drive project last week.

“Buses are going to be five feet from my door,” Donna Kearns, who lives on Boteler, said in an interview. “I’ve lived in Lowertown on and off for many, many years, and I know it’s an urban place and there’s transit, but this isn’t a NIMBY issue. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

She worries that the bus traffic will turn the street into a transit way. It’s bad enough that the STO stashes buses on Ottawa streets (“I walk my dog there every day, and sometimes there’s 14 or 15 buses stopped there at a time,” she says of the current underpass), but to let them use residential streets so they can keep their schedules is even more offensive, Kearns said.

“We’re confident that we’ll find an alternative,” said her councillor, Rideau-Vanier’s Mathieu Fleury. Thursday afternoon, he wrote to residents saying the city had told the National Capital Commission, which wants Sussex Drive to be a “ceremonial route” between Rideau Hall and Parliament and is paying for some of the upgrades, that the bus lane is staying.

We’re not actually talking about all that many buses, Fleury said. Gatineau’s new Rapibus system, essentially a new Transitway opening north of the river in the fall, is supposed to dramatically reduce the number of STO buses plying Ottawa’s streets. It’ll be somewhere between 15 and 88 buses that cross the river at all during the afternoon rush hour, not all of them will need to lay up at the north end of King Edward.

“We don’t know how many it will be,” he said. “We’re still waiting for those numbers from STO, because they don’t know yet themselves … By the time this would be implemented, there would be a whole different way for those buses to come here.”

The roundabout is almost certainly staying, despite the decision to keep the bus lane, too. Fleury said it’s supposed to do several things, including improving bike links between New Edinburgh and Lowertown and giving STO buses that run west to east through downtown Ottawa a way to turn around without rumbling through the rest of Lowertown after they make their final drop-offs near the Rideau Centre.

“The roundabout is actually a positive way to move buses from the Market and Lowertown and force them onto arterial roads,” Fleury said. It should mean an end to STO buses on streets like Cumberland.

The construction contract is going out to tender very soon, probably in the first week of July; Fleury emphasized that the problem isn’t the roundabout, it’s the “operational planning” for how buses will use it.

Ottawa can’t prevent Gatineau buses from crossing into the city, though in theory Ottawa doesn’t have to make it easy to do so.

Fleury and Kearns agree on the general nature of a long-term solution: fewer STO buses on Ottawa streets. Fleury wants travellers on the Ottawa side to use the soon-to-be-built light-rail system to travel east and west and transfer to STO buses only at Bayview or LeBreton stations. They could zip back and forth across the river there, staying out of Lowertown entirely. But nobody’s talking about doing that any time soon.