Slow Change Expected After Pimisi LRT Fiasco: BENN

Saturday columnist Ron Benn weighs in on the chaos at the Pimisi light-rail station on Canada Day.

The Pimisi LRT station was designed as a high-volume connection point. In the mornings, for public servants connecting to buses pointed towards the bridges over the river and to deliver their passengers to their the concrete prairie dog communities in Gatineau.

In the afternoons, it was to move this same demographic off of buses and on to east- or west-bound short trains.

Parts Of Hwy. 417 To Close For Bridge Replacement

Short you ask? Capacity is limited to 600 people.

Thus the exits and entrances onto the long overpass that is Booth Street. Long enough to allow OC Transpo buses to queue waiting to digest or egest hundreds of passengers at a time. Hundreds you ask? Yes, because the trains can only handle 600 at a time. Note the recurring theme.

All of which takes us to the station-design failure. The designers did not contemplate any other possible use of the Pimisi LRT station.

The future development of the long-ignored LeBreton Flats? Planners only contemplated a forest of high-rise apartment and office towers. The residents would work near where they lived. No need to design that load factor into the station design.

A 25-year construction zone (not an exaggeration) as LeBreton is built out, and all the traffic congestion that comes with temporary (assuming two or three years qualifies as temporary) lane closures? Not even a blip on the geologic time scale. Next.

Pedestrian traffic to and from events such as Bluesfest? Once a year (10 nights – but once a year). Arrivals will be scattered over several hours. That 20,000 ticketed fans may descend into the station at the end of the night’s festivities? Only 1,200 can depart every five minutes. Where will the other 19,000 stand? Washrooms for those who had one or more too many lukewarm malted beverages? Oops. Neither of these connected situations were considered. You can’t expect people who are paid in the low six figures to think, let alone of everything.

City Creates Open-Fire Tattle Line

In fairness, the Canada Day celebrations have historically been centered around Parliament Hill. The shift to the Canadian War Museum site was recent, due to the massive, no-reasonable-end in sight (but think at least a decade), renovation of the Centre Block. I am prepared to cut the design team some slack for not considering the possibility that 100,000 people might be heading down the middle of Booth Street all at one time.

What can be done about it? Nothing physical in the short term.

Better coordination between city staff, OC Transpo, Canadian Heritage and the police service is a necessity, as is better communication to the public. That OC Transpo and the city were caught unawares by the decisions made by Canadian Heritage and the police service is disappointing, but not surprising. Large organizations seldom synchronize their efforts well. Factor in the long weekend, when the inherent risk of unread e-mail messages or voice messages are not retrieved on a timely basis because the recipient has taken an extra long weekend.

It takes an embarrassment such as the problem four organizations suffered to initiate change. Of course we will have to wait until all the dust settles from the waving of arms and finger-pointing.

Time will tell. Mind you, that time frame might be geologic in scale.

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