The City of Ottawa has announced that it will be changing the route of the Stage 2 O-Train Trillium line extension to bring it closer to the neighbourhood of Riverside South.
The new route will see the Trillium Line’s terminal station at the corner of Earl Armstrong and Bowesville roads, about a kilometre further south than previously planned.
“In Riverside South alone, the city is forecasting a growth of nearly 15,000 households or approximately 40,000 people over the course of the next 10 years,” Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said.
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He said there is no additional cost to change the route.
“There’s in fact a small savings because we’re using our corridor, which we already own, as opposed to buying or leasing from a third party,” Watson said, adding the train will no longer impact approximately 12 acres of environmentally sensitive lands, including wetlands.
The new route will also allow the Trillium Line to potentially extend further west in the future to a station at Limebank Road, though this proposed extension is not currently funded, and would cost about $30 million according to Chris Swail, director of O-Train planning, and would require an additional train.
Swail said under the previous alignment the extension to Limebank would not have been possible.
“We had more environmentally sensitive lands. We were also getting into issues where zoning came into play, with respect to heights associated with the airport lands,” he said.
The Stage 2 extension of the Trillium Line is anticipated to open in 2021.
Swail said the request for proposal to build the Trillium extension from Greenboro to Bowesville stations will be released towards the end of this month.
This article originally appeared in Metro News.
