More transit dreaming for Ottawa

A few months ago, Dwight Williams wrote an article on Spacing Ottawa (which I wrote about on this blog) about uniting the city's mega-projects, light-rail and the Lansdowne redevelopment, with a rail line down Bank Street. He's since fleshed out the idea into an all-out proposal for a Streetcar and LRT system for the city of Ottawa, which you can see above.

There are a lot of interesting decisions Williams decided to feature in his plan, whether by including stops or choosing not to. One is the extension of light-rail part-way along the Ottawa River Parkway, complemented by a streetcar line down Carling Avenue. Light-rail doesn't go to Baseline Station, but a streetcar heads there, and one also heads to Bayshore to connect the southern and western transitways, respectively. A southeastern LRT line connects downtown with the airport, which is kind of a big deal. It looks like a streetcar line connects the LRT spine to the General Hospital complex, and Riverside Hospital and CHEO along with it.

There are likely plenty of other aspects you may have noticed, and feel free to mention them in the comments. It's certainly an interesting proposal to look at.

Bus ride reading: Ottawa's Streetcars

On the recommendation of a commenter on this website, I went to the Ottawa library to pick up Ottawa's Streetcars: An Illustrated History of Electric Railway Transit in Canada's Capital City, by Bill McKeown (Railfare - DC Books, 2006). I was not disappointed.

In all, 256 pages with over 300 photos, a good number of them full-colour, and a rich written history of our city's long-lived yet quickly-discarded system of streetcars. McKeown assembled the authoritative history of Ottawa's streetcar system in this volume, and the output of his 50 years of research seems like it would take someone attempting a similar undertaking today much, much longer.

As tempting as it would be to simply flip through the book for the pictures, doing so would leave you missing the rich stories McKeown tells in the work. Like the legend of the reason why the Ottawa Transit Commission stopped running any routes with the number seven in them: Because a child was struck and killed in a collision with the number seven train. And McKeown's exhaustive appendices offer more than enough information for the most ambitious and information-hungry transit enthusiast.

Although the large hardcover work is more suited to coffee-table reading that bus ride reading, it's definitely worth reading for anyone with even a passing interest in the history of public transit in Ottawa.