Central Transitway (OC Transpo)

The Central Transitway is the downtown section of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada's Transitway. The section of the Transitway uses dedicated lanes on existing streets, namely Albert Street for westbound routes and Slater Street for eastbound routes. The lanes are dedicated to buses only on weekdays from the start of morning rush hour (6:00 am) to the end of evening rush hour (6:00 pm); they are otherwise open to regular traffic. Even during rush hour, regular traffic needs to cross the dedicated lanes to access right turning lanes.

This section of the Transitway has four nominal stops: Bay, Kent, Bank and Metcalfe. The eastbound and westbound halves of the stops are not co-located and are not necessarily aligned to each other. For scheduling convenience, identical routes stop at all stations.

The Central Transitway gets very congested during rush hour due to the number of express routes, which provide door-to-door service to those who work downtown and live in farflung suburbs. Almost all express routes pass through the Central Transitway.

Initial plans for the Transitway included a bus-only tunnel in this section but the cost of a ventilated tunnel for conventional buses was deemed too expensive and was not warranted at the time. In 2006, it was proposed to extend the O-Train downtown as a tramway over the same streets while keeping existing bus and car traffic. The idea was met with objections from businesses along those streets, as normal access to the businesses would be impeded.

Future

The city plans to replace the Central Transitway with the Confederation Line, a rail-based rapid transit system.

A 12.5 km rapid transit line will be built from the Tunney's Pasture area west of downtown to the Blair area in the east of the city. The service is scheduled to open to riders in 2018. Afterwards, the line will be extended from Tunney's Pasture west to Baseline station.

Another line will then be built and will travel from the downtown core to South Keys, the airport, and the Riverside South suburban community.

These two lines will be interlined through a 2.5 km tunnel underneath Queen street. The four stations of the Central Transitway will be replaced with two subway stations: Lyon (replacing Bay and Kent), and Parliament (replacing Bank and Metcalfe). A third station, Rideau, to be the hub of the network, will be built under Rideau Street with pedestrian tunnels connecting both sides of the street. All three stations will have 150 m (490 ft) platforms, about the same length as the Toronto subway and Montreal Metro.