[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Light well, Outrement Station, Montréal Metro"][/caption] As rail-starved Ottawans wait for the latest attempt at light-rail transit to creep slowly towards completion, one question remains unanswered: who will design the stations? Admittedly, this has little to do with the actual nuts and bolts of the proposed system, or to do with the all-important dilemma that is funding its construction, but it is an important question nevertheless. After all, this system will be used by tens of thousands of people every day, so it seems only logical that stations should be pleasant and interesting places to wait for a train, right? The current Transitway system seems to be the antithesis of this philosophy. Right now, stations range from dank and unpleasant (St. Laurent), to utilitarian (the majority, like Hurdman and Lincoln Fields), to mildly pleasing (Dominion comes to mind). Transitway stations betray their 80s heritage at a glance: concrete abounds, and the ubiquitous red tubing and glass that makes up nearly every shelter quickly becomes depressing and repetitive.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="579" caption="Is it all just pie in the sky without the feds?"][/caption] Editor's note: the following article was written by Peter Raaymakers,  Executive Director of  Transit Ottawa. It originally appeared on the Public Transit in Ottawa website. ___________ The City of Ottawa is still waiting to hear the federal government announce their intentions to match (or hopefully exceed) the provincial $600M funding pledge for the city's $2.1B light-rail transit plan. Queen's Park made its pledge back in December, and the general understanding was that a similar announcement from Federal ...

Last Friday I had the opportunity to try out the commuter bus line offering return service to downtown Carleton Place that was launched earlier this month. As I wrote in the preview post: Unlike most commuter bus services in the Ottawa valley, Lanark Community Transit is offering a return service that will allow passengers to go "against the flow" and actually travel to an outlying town in the morning ...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Bumper-to-bumper on our BRT - growing pains on the way to adulthood?"][/caption] Reading my friend Chris Bradshaw’s recent Spacing Ottawa opinion piece on rapid transit reminds me of the challenges of a growing family. Canada is a family of cities of various ages and therefore at various stages of maturity. Montreal and Toronto are the “older children”. They were the first ones to go through the growing pains of passing through the stages of development that children experience as they move through their teenage years and into adulthood. Because they are older, they always thought of themselves as the “bigger kids” and, like most first-borns and second-borns in large families, they were the ones who had to learn from mistakes, rather than benefit from the teachings of older siblings they never had. Ottawa, on the other hand, is one of the family’s younger children. It was cuddled and sheltered more than its older siblings and, accordingly, was spared some of the mistakes made by its older brothers and sisters. It has more green space than its older siblings. It has fewer of the harmful effects of some of the more misguided urban interventions tried by their larger siblings. It has fewer scars as a result. But just as we don’t imagine children growing from newborn to toddler to big kids while still drinking milk from a bottle or using diapers, so cities grow out of the more junior arrangements that come from the days when they were smaller. And children usually do resist, at first, things like potty training, picking up after themselves or doing their homework after school. It’s hard to grow up. It’s also unpleasant at first. And children aren’t equipped to see the richer life that awaits them once they learn new skills and take responsibility for themselves.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Prowling the depths: best left to auto traffic?"][/caption] Chris Bradshaw is the co-founder of Vrtu-car, and was co-owner until 2006. He is also a co-founder and long-time (1988-2000) executive member of Ottawalk. He is now a member of the Ottawa Seniors Transportation Committee. Chris and his wife live car-lite in Sandy Hill. Originally submitted as a comment, the following is Chris's response to an earlier Spacing Ottawa post ("The History of the Ottawa subway") wherein author Alain Miguelez outlined his reasons for supporting the City's plans to build a transit tunnel underneath downtown Ottawa. - The history related by Alain Miguelez shows that the wonderful 'moment' we have today is partly thanks to the procrastination of previous generations of planners and politicians; otherwise, we would be stuck with yesterday's technology and problematique. It is sobering to consider whether the plan now waiting for funding and environmental assessment will suffer the same fate. I expect so. I start with the premise that people belong at the surface of cities. Let vehicles with their power and speed use the subterranean spaces. For instance, downtown auto users are either passing through or destined for an underground parking garage. Why don't they go underground, instead of people? And the proposal's enormous number of very long escalators should simply be strung out horizontally for moving sidewalks to connect two super stations at either end of downtown, like Denver does (linked for decades by free electric buses on the surface).

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With last week's post on the old Ottawa streetcar system fresh in out minds, this edition of Where In Ottawa tests your knowledge of Ottawa transit history: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Can you solve this week's streetcar puzzler on your own, or will you rely on the kindness of strangers?"][/caption] I am looking at the area that once contained one of the trickiest one-two combinations in the city's streetcar network. You had to run the gauntlet and avoid becoming a deadman. Where am I? As well as sending us your guess, you can also ...

Between Tonya Davidson's post on the Centennial year and the above video of Ottawa's old streetcar system, it seems it is History Week here at Spacing Ottawa. It was Eric Darwin from West Side Action that first drew our attention to this amazing colour video, mostly shot in the late 1950s, of streetcars plying Ottawa's roads and avenues. The segments are haphazardly joined together, but as you'll see, the route took the cars through Confederation square, along ...