The case for the Baseline BRT
Background
In 2013, the Transportation Master Plan appeared with a Baseline BRT, stretching from Billings Bridge to Algonquin Station in the "affordable" vision, and to Bayshore in the "ultimate" concept. According to city staff, this was the highest priority corridor for BRT in the city.
Fast forward to 2023. The first part of the Transportation Master Plan, the active transportation portion, appeared in Spring of 2023, but the release of the rest has been pushed to quarter two of this year.
In Baseline BRT news, the environmental assessment for this project was approved in 2017, following a series of consultation meetings. Documents can be found below.
Fast forward to 2025. The 88 is an unreliable route, with slow speeds, lots of delays, and a decreasing reputation. It is also the busiest bus route in the city, with an average of 17,000 weekday boardings. The Baseline BRT project has sat in planning purgatory for years; design east of Baseline was completed sometime in the past few years, but the project is allegedly delayed past 2031, with funding not coming.
On the 16th of January, College Ward Councilor Laine Johnson hosted a web meeting to discuss the Baseline BRT project, possibly the first official news on the project in nearly a decade. I was able to obtain a French, but not English, version of the slides here. Video here.
We'll have more news when the Transportation Master Plan releases, hopefully soon; in the meantime, we need to build a base of popular support for this project, and pressure elected officials to build the full project ASAP.
In BRT News The current plan is to construct the project in three phases. The first phase, officially called the "Baseline/Greenbank transit priority intersection improvements" but which I call the Baseline Interim Transit Priority Project (after a similar project on Carling, which has been forgotten by the City), will rebuild the intersection of Baseline/Greenbank to its ultimate width with bike lanes and side-running transit lanes for the future 68 and 88 buses. Constellation approaching Baseline will receive a transit lane to turn left onto Baseline, connecting to the transit lane that runs as far west as Cobden, while an eastbound lane will be converted to transit priority between Cobden and Constellation.
This project is set to begin construction this spring, and will wrap up by fall 2026.
Phase 2 will build a median BRT, like on Chapman Mills in Barrhaven, between Data Centre and Algonquin Station. This segment will cost $290 million for 7.6 km, up 80% from the $161 million estimate posted in 2019. This amounts to a cost of $38.1 million/km.
Phase 3 will extend the median BRT to Bayshore Station, including across the segment already disrupted for Phase 1. There is no known timeline for this segment, and I believe that full design work is incomplete. This segment is estimated to cost $245 million for 5.6 km of work, or $43.8 million/km.
The city is waiting on funding from upper levels of government to commence the second and third phases of the project.
Windshield vision at the City of OttawaThis is the busiest bus route in the city; while its non-funding seems to date back to the original 2017 vision, in which the city designed the Baseline Interim Transit Priority Project (link 3 of the five documents posted above), there are measures the city could take to improve service as soon as possible, such as funding 10 minute service in the midday and 15 minute service in the evenings.
Are they doing that with New Ways to Bus? Hahahahaha no.
Saturday service on the central segment of the 88 is being cut; the overlap between Baseline and Queensway Carleton means that service will increase on that segment, but otherwise, this is a "status quo" schedule.
What can OC Transpo do to improve the route, without spending large sums of money on capital, which we are apparently waiting on other levels of government for?
Stop ConsolidationThe ideal stop spacing, or average distance between stops, varies by land use and context, but most studies cite a figure around 400 metres or more. How does the 88 do, on the section to be "BRT-ified"?
The full buildout of Baseline BRT, between Data Centre Road and Bayshore Station, is to be about 14.5 kilometres long. The maps posted by the City of Ottawa indicate 26 stops, about a stop spacing of 550 metres, which is rather close for a BRT. The current 88, from 12.9 km from Robertson/Baseline to Data Centre, has 36 stops westbound and 35 stops eastbound, for an average stop spacing of about 350 metres, but this includes the Heron Bridge, without which the stop spacing is closer to 300 metres.
Given the spacing of some of the stops on the central portion of the route, stop consolidation would help increase speeds on the most congested portion of the route, improving transit service for tens of thousands of users everyday.
I think that 13 stops in each direction could be removed, reducing the number of stops from 36 westbound and 35 eastbound to 23 and 22 respectively, with a stop spacing of about 500-550 metres. This would speed up service at a very low cost to OC Transpo, while not compromising the accessibility of the route.
There are other combinations of stops that could be removed, and this reflects my opinion only.
ServiceThe 88 is OC Transpo's busiest bus route, at 17 thousand passengers a day. This also means that the existing route is nigh out of capacity, especially when you consider cancellations, delays, and bunching. Average ridership per-trip is above 100 in the daytime, dropping to about 70 riders/trip in the evenings. Weekend ridership is high as well, with ridership hitting 80 riders/trip on both Saturdays and Sunday.
Not only is the 88 service deplorable, but it is also at capacity, with no room to absorb more riders, even if there was the ridership demand (and I think there is ridership demand, given congestion on Baseline Road).
This would, however, require a service increase. Given the environment that OC Transpo operates in, it is less feasible than stop consolidation.
After a Baseline BRT buildout, OC Transpo will have to improve service. 15 minute service is inadequate for a BRT, and the resulting ridership increase will certainly overload the route.
Make OC Transpo great againAt the consultation, staff said that Baseline BRT would require funding from upper levels of government.
The overall cost of the Baseline BRT is $535 million, with phase two costs up 80% from just eight years ago. Extrapolating to the entire project, had we started construction in 2017, the whole Bayshore <-> Billings Bridge project could have been built for $300 million.
The more we wait for other governments to fund our projects, the more costs escalate, and the more transit riders have to wait for a bus that's slow and unreliable. I understand the city's dilemma over Stage 3, as $6.5 billion is a truly ludicrous cost, if partly self-inflicted. For $535 million, we should have dealt with the provincial government during the New Deal for Ottawa, and asked for 50/50 funding and bypass the federal government altogether. This project has 4x the current ridership of a Kanata North BRT, whose funding isn't even guaranteed, given recent events in federal politics.
In the absence of a deal, we should fund half of the line ourselves and present it to upper levels of government as a fait accompli to obtain funding for the second half. It would also restore upper level confidence in the ability of the City of Ottawa to execute transit projects, a reputation that the Stage 1 LRT has destroyed. Ottawa can be a transit innovator, using our historic experience with the Transitway as leverage to build a second type of Transitway, a low cost method to improve rider experience on key routes and gain ridership.
A note on cost - as we build more projects, the cost should theoretically decrease, as city staff gain experience, contractors become used to working with the City of Ottawa, and residents begin to support similar projects. That the opposite has occurred is due to a combination of general cost inflation across the world and Canada in particular and the City's catastrophic lowballing on all three LRT contracts. Improving transit is an investment Ottawa cannot afford to lose out on. We needed the Baseline BRT yesterday, and we need it even more today. The 88 has the highest recovery rate of any route in the OC Transpo, exceeding its pre-pandemic ridership. If we want to see the Baseline BRT happen, there has to be a concerted political push from advocacy groups and citizens to get it built as soon as possible. Please, contact your councilor and tell them you want this project and are willing to pay for it, or ask groups such as Strong Towns Ottawa and Horizon Ottawa to advocate for this project.
Until next time.