How is the City going to ensure continued transportation mobility during the construction of the OLRT project?
The final traffic/transit management strategy for the OLRT project will be completed as part of final design. The City will work with the private sector team chosen to build the OLRT project to develop a transit and traffic management plan balancing the need to maintain a viable transportation network with the disruption required to build the system.
The City is undertaking a Transportation Demand Management Strategy, called Travel Choices, that will help determine the best way to manage transportation demand both during and after construction. This work, in tandem with the construction staging and sequencing planning being developed by the City’s preliminary engineering team, will inform the development of the final transportation management strategy with the final design and construction consortium.
The traffic/transit management plan will also include the use of transportation system management strategies and systems currently integrated with the City’s state of the art Traffic Control Centre, as well as the utilization of new and temporary infrastructure currently planned or recently built through the City and other government agencies. For example the City will be working closely with the Ministry of Transportation Ontario to coordinate OLRT construction with their Highway 417 lane widening plans so that the City can use the extra lanes they are creating for buses while OLRT is being built, this will alleviate transit pressure that otherwise would have been forced to use local and residential streets.
