Here is a list of points we have already started to hear from city staff and some politicians with some obvious counterpoints:
Pro-road points: Counterpoints: Don't worry, the city only plans to build a link to the hospital from Riverside, the rest of the corridor will not be touched for 10 years or more. Heard that one before on this project. In early 2000 Brendan Reid, senior traffic planner with the region at the time, told a room full of people in Sandy Hill that many of us were worrying for nothing because the AVTC EA was over a decade away. By September 2000 Brenden's department submitted a study (by Delcan) to Transportation Committee recommending the immediate start of the AVTC EA. By the way, Brendan now works for Delcan. The moral of the story is that 10 years can fly by in what seems like months. In fact, if you check the capital works plan within the next 10 years you'll find $68 million dollars for this project between 2006 and 2012. That's more than double the amount needed to just build a secondary link to the hospital. The General Hospital campus needs better access than Smyth road. Absolutely right. The hospital could use secondary access for emergency vehicles and is probably the largest employment centre in the city with nothing but unreliable milk-run bus service. Over 8000 people work at the hospital and their only options to get there by transit are the 16 and the 85. A spur from the transitway to the General Campus could allow more staff to take transit thus freeing up parking for patients and visitors as well as provide a congestion free means of access for ambulances because emergency vehicles can use the transitway. This transitway spur would cost much less than the city's preferred solution. This highlights the main point about hospital access: if this study is primarily about hospital access why is most of the design effort being spent on the other sections of the road? Look at the plans in this EA and ask yourself is this just an access road from Riverside to the hospital? The proposed road will improve air quality and reduce congestion. The primary need stated in this EA for this road (and notice there is no mention of the hospital who's workers come primarily from north and east) is to carry 1800 cars per hour from new developments in the south-east of the city to and from downtown and points west via the 417 by the year 2021. The capacity of this proposed roadway at the northern end at the 417 is only about 800 cars per hour. That is a clear recipe for congestion and increased cut-through traffic on existing streets. The new Official Plan forecasts at least 30,000 more cars in all of Ottawa in the daily rush hour in 2021. It is hard to believe 1800 of those people would not prefer to take transit. It is even harder to believe that if the transit was there that the buses and trains would be empty because that is how one calculates that a road is better than transit (by assuming that the transit would not be used). You will hear transportation planners say with a straight face that air quality will be better with a road because no more than 30% of the population will take transit so if we build more transit for the south east instead of a road it will not be used. Most school children can figure out that if most of those 1800 people could choose transit we would have less pollution and less congestion. We need a balanced approach, we cannot just invest in transit. Agreed. We need a balanced approach and should not be only expanding one mode of transportation. Road expansions have been in every annual budget in our lifetimes. Road capacity has never and probably will never be reduced. Ottawa typically adds about 100 kilometres of roadway to our network each year. Transit on the other hand has years of no expansion as well as years in which service was reduced. Not spending $100+ million dollars on an AVTC road hardly means all road building will come to a screeching halt. It means we will be spared making a traffic planning mistake and can invest that money in other projects with a positive return or give ourselves a tax break. We will need the Alta Vista corridor road or else there will be traffic chaos in the south-east sector within 20 years. Heard that one before, a long time ago. It is exactly what the road planners in 1971 said when Ottawans voted against routing the 417 from Montreal through the Alta Vista Corridor. 1991 came and went and the road network did not collapse. Compared to 1971 we plan on having more transit. In 1971, nobody in Ottawa had experienced smog days and asthma rates were a small fraction of what they are now. So how come our transportation planners are still talking like it is 1971? One last point: Folks in Orleans or Kanata who might think this mostly north-south corridor is of little interest to you ... Anybody who travels to or from downtown should be worried about this proposal because the Queensway at Nicholas is very congested during rush hour now. Imagine another 800 cars an hour from the south trying to get through the Nicholas/417 interchange and what that will do to the folks from the east and west ends and their daily commute.