While trotting out to Bayview Station recently I noticed these tread tracks in the snow, leading out toward the Macdonald Commuter Expressway. Barely visible in the distance is one of those soil sample hole drillers that we have seen so frequently in past years along the LRT route.
These aren’t cheap engineering exercises, which lead me to wonder what someone might be planning out there beside the popular new OTrain bike path.
Rabbit crossing signs.
Very large diesel powered red and white rabbits that hold 60 passengers or more.
My first thought is that this is preliminary planning for a diversion that would permit transit traffic to travel east to this point on the commuter expressway then run through and connect with Albert.
There already exists an on-ramp at the north end of the proposed Preston St extension.
This would remove some of the express bus traffic from Scott but would do little for the folks along Albert.
Of course, my estimates are always wrong.
Three possibilities occur to me:
1) Temporary bus station on the JAM Expressway – as in my “fantasy Transpo league” scenario for diverting express buses off Scott/Albert (http://denvan.ca/wp/another-idea-for-getting-buses-off-scott-street/. Probably not — as a station would need to be at the top of that rise to the East — but a boy can dream.
2) New location for the O-Train platform during LRT construction – which would also bring it closer to the JAM. (see above) On recent Bayview station designs, they had an odd cycle / ped path looping North from the current platform, West across the South part of the Bayview Yards land.
3) The once-proposed Gatineau BRT / LRT turnaround point which was to take STO buses across the Prince of Wales Bridge and drop passengers at the Bayview LRT station – which was always a silly notion since the O-Train and a train bridge are already THERE, but it was seriously being floated at one point.
They may be trying to establish a geotechnical profile for the entire area so that when they build Bayview they know what is going to slump back towards any excavations they make.