The LRT Debacle Gets Worse

The west end of this city is a mess.

From Tunney’s Pasture to Algonquin College, this part of town has a massive scar down the centre of it.

That scar is the incompetently handled west part of the light-rail project. The project, originally scheduled to be finished by this year, is now been delayed into 2027. That means two more years of traffic re-routes, road closures, dust, dirt, noise and intersection rebuilds that have local drivers confused by the constantly changing street rules and routes.

On the Ottawa river parkway, a road designed to impress rubber-wheeled visitors to the city with its yellow-brick road approach to the Parliamentary district, this beautiful parkland has been ripped up and destroyed by years of construction and a minimum of two years extra of dusty dirty roadwork. Add to that construction the disruptive building at the same time of Westboro Beach courtesy of the National Capital Commission.

At a time when the city should be doing its best to welcome money-toting tourists to our community, we greet them on the parkway with our worst-foot-forward. What a mess. That sloppiness goes beyond the woes of the average commuter and, in addition, adversely affects our economy in a period of economic uncertainty.

It gets worse. Pity the drivers and businesses along one of our main arterial routes Richmond Road. The temporary roads have been laid out in such a thin manner that OC Transpo bus right mirrors hammer road signs along the edge of the streets. No fault of Transpo. The buses just don’t fit.

And the way the streets have been laid out are such that a blood hound could not find the besieged businesses along the constantly changing dirty dusty roadways. You can’t drive through the area without closing windows because the dust is so thick. Drivers are constantly pulling U-turns because a temporary roadway that was open yesterday is closed today.

The city needs to take control of this filthy traffic mess and add some rationality to the construction process.

The people suffering from this $6.7-billion light-rail fiasco are not just inconvenienced mass transit users but residents and businesses along the construction scar, commuters trying to find their way through the Byzantine maze of temporary roads and a tourism industry that is vitally needed by our community.

City hall and Transpo have done a bad job with LRT and it is getting worse.

Ken Gray

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