David Reevely writes in his Ottawa Citizen blog Greater Ottawa, that a representative of Arnon was lobbying the City about LRT in Kitchissippi Ward, but that details were lacking. What a surprise.
However, we can speculate on what might be going on. Arnon owns 853 Carling avenue, immediately west of the Carling Otrain station, now a large parking lot, former home to Campbell Iron and Steel.
They propose to build two large high condo towers on the site, and two lower rise condo buildings on the back sides of the site, toward Hickory St, where the city proposes to built an econo-bridge over the Otrain track to get all those condo dwellers over to Preston or to the Otrain station.
However, one of the options to route the Western LRT is via Bayview station – the Otrain track – turning west onto Carling Avenue. This is a pretty low rated option, due to the difficulties in getting the LRT up out of the cut, swinging it west just in time to up the rather steep hill on Carling towards the Farm.
For that reason, one routing would take it under Carling, swinging up thru the former temporary building sites on the south side of Carling, and cutting-tunnelling thru the top of the hill, coming out on the south side of Carling in front of the federal agri can research buildings along Carling.
A second, even more awkward option brings it up out of the Otrain cut starting at the Queensway, so it swings up and OVER THE TOP of Carling, then running elevated up the median and again chopping the top off the hill. To get to this alignment, the turn radius would cut into the Arnon property.
When council directed that all WLRT options remain open, this means that the Arnon site cannot be built out except by leaving the potentially-expropriatable prime corner unbuilt, and how do you sell condos if you dont know if there will be a honkin great big elevated concrete superstructure for trains built outside the third floor balcony windows.
I expect Arnon was off seeking reassurance that their site on Carling, in Kitchissippi ward, wont be needed for the LRT, so that they get on with planning their buildings.
Those innocuous decisions by council, such as to keep all WLRToptions on the table, have consequences …
PS another problem with running the WLRT along the Otrain and Carling is that it skips the regions second largest employment site, Tunneys Pasture, in favour of miles of empty experimental farm lands and a hospital, and hospitals are notoriously low generators of transit traffic. So the WLRT here would be awkward engineering,have little or no catchment area, a dead area to its south, and it buggers up the n-s otrain corridor to boot. What;s not to love…