Coming back to Carleton after the summer can hold excitement for some and dread for others, but the return to school in the fall is always hectic.
I went to campus a few days before classes started to renew my U-Pass—and promptly got stuck in 40 minutes of traffic on the way out of campus, at 2 p.m., on a day when the campus was bare.
In the week that classes have been back in full swing, the conversion of Campus Avenue to a one-way street has caused buses to spend at least half an hour—if they’re lucky—turning around the curve at the river.
This change to Campus Avenue is in response to the closure of the swing bridge at Hog’s Back Falls, and the upcoming O-Train closure in 2020.
According to the official announcement, the permanent conversion of Campus Avenue to a one-way street was one of a number of steps Carleton is taking to mitigate traffic congestion on campus.
The issue with these steps is that once cars and buses reach Richcraft Hall, they have to funnel from two lanes into one around the bend, which holds traffic up a great deal. They also have to wait for cars exiting the parking lot by Richcraft Hall to go into the lane.
Overall, that’s a lot of cars for one single lane. While the change makes moving up Campus Avenue easier, it has become worse for vehicles once they reach the bottleneck by the river.
With the LRT on the cusp of completion, the construction happening in the city seems to affect Carleton on all ends. The closure of the Hog’s Back swing bridge affects commuters, drivers, and student pedestrians coming to campus.
When the buses were difficult to take in the winter, the O-Train offered a good alternative to get out of the congestion of campus. The construction at Highway 417 at Bronson Avenue has created bottlenecks for southbound traffic, and the 10 goes along this route to Carleton.
The already unreliable transit system seems to have gotten worse for students from all ends of the city. These changes are expected to last until 2022, and knowing Ottawa, it could last much longer than that.
Understandably, the National Capital Commission (NCC) makes these transport decisions, and Carleton has to come up with ways to accommodate the students, professors, and workers coming in to campus.
That being said, the change to Campus Avenue came on incredibly short notice, on Aug. 30, giving people very little time to prepare for the reality of changes to their routes to the university.
It is hard to see these changes as steps to mitigate traffic when they have created some of the worst hold-ups and traffic I have seen in my four years at Carleton. It makes me dread the upcoming snow, which tends to delay buses anyways, and what effect the road changes will have on our commutes.
Carleton’s website states that “traffic flow is expected to improve further when the new Stadium Way entrance through Parking Lot 5 opens in mid-October onto Bronson Avenue as a right-in and right-out access/egress from campus.”
We can only hope that over time, the traffic situation will improve. In the second week, the bus took 25 minutes to get through the Richcraft Hall bend, instead of 40 minutes the week before, so maybe improvements are coming.
All I can say is, fall 2019 looks like it will be a pretty disruptive time to be a new student at Carleton.
File photo.
