Why Ottawa built an LRT station in the middle of nowhere

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Bowesville Station rises from the scrub and fields of south Ottawa like a shining city of steel and glass set amid a Costco-sized parking lot.

It’s the penultimate station on the Trillium Line. There isn’t a house in sight and there’s no development planned. Until further notice, it will remain mostly scrubland and cow pastures.

So when passengers are finally riding the diesel-powered trains on the long-delayed north-south route on the Trillium Line LRT, they might be forgiven for asking: “Why would anyone put a train station here?”

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To understand why Bowesville is where it is, you have to understand the “long and twisted history of the LRT in south Ottawa,” says Steve Desroches, city councillor for Riverside South-Findlay Creek.

Twenty years ago, the city was planning a north-south electric LRT along the former O-Train line from Bayview to Leitrim that would curve west through Barrhaven all the way to Greenbank Road. But politics killed that plan in a narrow 13-11 city council vote in 2006.

“To my last days, I’ll say that was a very poor decision to cancel that and we’ve been living with the consequence of that in South Ottawa ever since,” Desroches said.

When Ottawa’s LRT was revived in 2011, the north-south route was modified, running from Bayview to Bowesville, where a massive park-and-ride would be built for commuters coming in from the south end of the city and beyond. That plan was modified again, however, when another station was added on at Limebank Road, three kilometres west, to be paid for 50-50 by the province and a special development levy on residents.

That left Bowesville sandwiched between Limebank and Leitrim stations, both of which are squeezed into tight areas with no room for parking. Bowesville, however, had enough land for an 800-spot park and ride, with room to expand to 2,000. When the LRT was planned, massive park-and-rides were like a golden ticket.

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“Pre-pandemic, I have no doubt people would be using that park-and-ride, but post-pandemic, our park and rides have been decimated,” Desroches said. “That’s hit us hard. Those were our full fare-paying passengers who were taking advantage of their car and the benefits of rapid transit. Pre-pandemic, you could not find a space at the Fallowfield Park-and-Ride.”

Work from home has cut that supply of ridership, which in 2023 was just 57 per cent of what OC Transpo had been counting on to make LRT profitable. Although public servants recently began working three days a week in the office, it’s too early to tell how much that will boost transit ridership.

“At Bowesville, we’re going to see a lot of (excess) capacity there,” Desroches said. “If we could have modified our plans, we would have done so. But by the time the pandemic hit, the contracts had already been set.”

Still, Desroches is optimistic that parking and riding the train from Bowesville will become attractive, especially for Carleton University students and staff, and once the new Ottawa Hospital campus at Dow’s Lake is complete. Future development of federal government lands like the Charles Tupper Buiding near Vincent Massey Park also holds promise, he said.

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“There is some logic to having those parking spots for the growth that’s going to continue to come. If you live in Osgoode or Manotick or Greely, and you work at Carleton University, there will be great advantages to using that Bowesville Park and Ride,” he said. “And you’ll have no difficulty finding a spot!”

But what about development? The city’s new comprehensive zoning bylaw establishes transit hubs as areas of dense development. Highrises have shot up around transit stations in Westboro, Bayview, Blair and Dow’s Lake. Neighbourhoods near suburban stations like Findlay Creek and Riverside South continue to boom.

Bowesville remains, well, Bowesville.

“You can’t compare development inside the Greenbelt or in a neighbourhood like Kitchissippi to the urban boundary, Desroches said. “Those are two different markets.”

Still, despite the years that Bowesville Station has been in the books, there is still no secondary plan or community design plan for the area, although one is expected to be completed in late 2025. Land north of the station, on the other side of Earl Armstrong Road, lies within the airport operation area which prohibits its use for housing.

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South of the station, however, there is land for sale — a 163-acre parcel for a potential future “Falcon Ridge Village” that seller Avison Young says offers a “once in a generation opportunity” for developers and room for up to 10,000 residential units.

So is Bowesville a Field of Dreams example of “If you build it, they will come”? That’s the dilemma of urban planners. Do you build transit to serve communities or build communities around existing transit?

“This is one of those rare instances where transit is built in advance and now it’s up to us, the city and the industry, to get housing in there as fast as we can to support the LRT,” said Dave Renfroe, president of Renfroe Land Management, and one of a group of owners of the Falcon Ridge lands. “We’re going as quick as we can. It just takes a long time. It’s just smart planning to put houses there.”

The Falcon Ridge group also has plans to develop a second parcel of land — a 169-acre for industrial development on the east end of the property, abutting Albion Road and the new Hard Rock Casino. That land is within the operating zone of the airport and can’t be used for housing, but could be the “employment zone” for people living in the residential, village side extending west to Bowesville Road.

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“We see this as an opportunity to build a true, 15-minute community that’s only a few hundred metres from a transit station,” Renfroe said. The development, he said, would support ridership on the Trillium Line, create jobs, generate tax revenue and add much-needed housing.

Across the river in Barrhaven is an example of what can happen if the process is reversed: when developers build before the rapid transit link is complete. Highrise towers in the Chapman Mills were planned and built in anticipation of an LRT link that never came, Desroches said.

“We hear that complaint at planning committee meetings — that we’re building these densities and saying ‘transit will eventually come.” It gets those communities off on the wrong foot. We’ve seen that in Chapman Mills. They built on the anticipation and the expectation that the LRT was going to go through that corridor. And when it was cancelled, it changed the character of that Chapman Mills community. It was a step backward.

“There’s a logic to having the stations and the transit in place from Day 1. Then you can truly build a transit-oriented community.”

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Ultimately, it will be growth along the transit lines that will make OC Transpo sustainable, he said.

“That’s the key to building up ridership,” Desroches said. “It’s not going to be free transit or other gimmicks. I think we’re going to have to rely on densification and that’s going to take some time to come, not just at Bowesville, but all along the Trillium Line.”

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