On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I think we're going to have a Problem despite our attention to the details in recent years:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/bus-route-changes-ottawa-1.7018834

The networking to counter this plan is already underway, partly because we were already talking amongst ourselves and with city council. This is a good thing. We need to keep building on this.

Context: Lincoln Fields is one of the Transitway stations being refitted for service as part of OC Transpo's Confederation Line O-Train service in Ottawa's West End...

Three jobs applied to today.

(And yet another offer from a company I'm not familiar with asking me to take up a contract in Toronto. I can't afford to move. Not yet, anyway.)

Watching full city council arguing over whether to go with an investigation by the city's auditor-general or a full judicial inquiry re: what exactly went wrong re: the first expansion of Ottawa's LRT system and why. It's been going for the better part of five hours so far, still in progress as I type this. It's gotten rather heated at times!

I see that New Shepherd 18 went without a hitch. Eleven minutes and, at age 90, William Shatner is now an astronaut in addition to everything else he's been across the decades, flawed as he's been.

What else? I think that I realized yesterday that I'd forgotten that I'd been borrowing a CPAP machine for at least a year before actually purchasing one. Memory issues...

Public transit...there's a topic.

My understanding of the current state of OC Transpo and STO across the river in Gatineau goes like this: the buses and trains here are usually, at worst, ¾ empty. Everyone aboard has mostly managed to keep their distance from each other, and masks are standard good-manners practice. I can't afford to not use it if I want to leave my neighbourhood to do anything outside of it.

I keep paying for my monthly bus pass despite my lack of usage because they're a continuing target for deficit hawks, and they need the money to maintain the facilities and fleets for when Pandemic is finally over. Even if the levels of demand-for-service stay reduced afterward, the transit services have to be able to do their work safely.

I recently got called a "social thought leader". This, in the context of a push to get an O-Train line built under Bank Street:

https://clintondesveaux.medium.com/ottawans-favourable-to-bank-street-o-train-tunnel-a85925c68977

Before we started building the Confederation Line and Lines 1 and 2 were still bus routes, like it says. Route 2 ran a length spanning from Blair Transitway Station - near Gloucester Centre, and CSIS HQ - and Bayshore Mall. Which was pretty much most of the city back then.

As I said in the comments:

YES. This is exactly the point. Transit preserves civil society. Therefore it must be protected and defended, even as we defend funding for police, firefighting, public broadcasting, etc..

https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2020/04/coronavirus-public-transit-subway-bus-ridership-revenue/609556/

Details and links here for anyone interested who hasn't already seen them...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/octranspo-covid19-safety-bus-lrt-1.5498997

Yes, it's three days old. I apologize for the delay and the harms caused as a result.

I went to the Shenkman Arts Centre last night. City Hall had announced a public briefing/Q&A session to discuss the plans for leveraging redevelopment goals from OC Transpo's "Phase 2" plans to expand O-Train service from Blair Station into Orléans itself, and I wanted to see what's going on with that. The plans are collectively referred to at City Hall's website as "the Orléans Transportation Corridor".



Briefly, I'd say that the session was informative, and while there was a preoccupation among many of my fellow attendees with the consequences of the O-Train for their driving, with needs for supporting infrastructure...the city representatives, including Orléans Ward councillor Matt Luloff, managed to get the word out about the wider ambitions of this plan.



Particular attention went to St. Joseph's Boulevard. If you've been able to visit that original "main street" of Orléans in recent days, you'll understand why City Hall might want to see some changes in the look of it. Many businesses are housed in facilities set well back from the sidewalk, with wide swathes of parking lot making pedestrian access to those buildings and the businesses they house more difficult than it's needed to be. Some of the more recent buildings added to St. Joseph - the new facilities for Shoppers Drug Mart, the Royal Bank, Farm Boy, etc. in particular - were built to accomodate this goal through specific incentive programs jointed referred to as a "Community Improvement Plan".

(The attendance was high enough to require the attendees to split into simultaneously-briefed sessions on the first and second floors. I attended the second-floor session in full, but managed to catch a glimpse of the ground-floor session towards its end on my way home.)



Ideally, the goal is to steer St. Joseph Boulevard to more closely resemble the Wellington West and ByWard Market "main street" areas.



(Making a note to add photographic detail for the neighbourhoods I'm referring to later in the day!)

One example of the more amusing names we've given our O-Train cars: