Prepared by Fraser Pollock for The Friends of Lansdowne

Stadium transportation requirements

Throughout the early 20^th century (pre W.W. 2) most major sport stadiums were located in the middle of built up centrally located neighbourhoods. The land was usually already owned by the major tenant’s owner and was the best that could be purchased at the time. Beginning with the end of W.W.2, stadiums like families began to move out of the crowed central city to the suburbs. Even though, most of these older stadiums were well serviced by transit and main roads, team owners were ready for new and larger stadiums as well as their larger revenue. Starting in the late1950’s some communities realised that waiting for a team in any particular sport took too long, so they built stadiums on their own to lure new or existing teams to their own community. These stadiums were surrounded by enormous parking lots fed by wide local roads and limited access highways. There was no rail or streetcar service, maybe some bus service, the car was designed to be the prime method of transport to the stadium. This type of stadium development picked up speed in the 1950’s and continued till the early 1980’s.

Stadiums are not producing revenue if there is no event going on at the park and this became a problem when you had no ancillary development nearby. Little by little suburban stadiums carved off lots for malls or restaurants on the stadium property to produce more revenue. Off season, most of this development was at best sparsely attended or completely deserted. The realization began to take hold that stadium needed to be located in neighbourhoods that were alive year round not in a suburban parking lot. This forced the reintroduction of the concept that, you needed something other than the private car to provide transport to the site of the stadium if you are going to locate it inside an existing built up area.

A 24,000 seat stadium needs an adequate public transportation network. The existing street network, the mature urban fabric and the geographic restrictions of the Rideau Canal on two sides make a reasonable public transportation system for Lansdowne Park impossible. Lansdowne Park is served by only two arterials. Increasing daily vehicular traffic including heavy trucks to accommodate both the new residential units and a shopping mall and other enterprises built on a very small footprint will lead to gridlock most afternoons on Bank Street. This will impede the adequacy of transit throughout the entire core area of the City of Ottawa.