Monthly Archives: April 2012

Major changes coming to downtown streets

The current downtown Ottawa is rather blah. Some might even call it bleh. Over the decades, it has become a motor-vehicle-oriented environment, with the fast movement of vehicles the main only priority. We all know about the walls of buses. And the priority given to automobile commuters over pedestrians. Trees: rare as hen’s teeth. It has become a downtown one goes to because you have to. It is not a shopping, or even much of a recreation destination. All rather sad.

When the LRT is opened, there will be major changes. Most OC Transpo buses will be off the Albert and Slater bus lanes. What do we do with the freed-up space? Recall too that the current bus stops disgorge pedestrians at many locations; the LRT will deliver huge crowds, all at once, at limited locations.

So Council directed that the Downtown Moves study be conducted, to integrate urban design and transportation strategy, and to restore the balance among street users [in council's actual words]. Most people can understand that a vibrant downtown doesn’t  come from wider roads, faster traffic, or “getting everyone out” as quickly as possible ( I exclude from this understanding some select minority voices).

The Downtown Moves study isn’t about just tinkering with the core. It’s a major rewrite opportunity, to reallocate space, to refresh the downtown sidewalks and streets for the next 50 to 100 years. Thus far, the working teams have not been timid. So it is time to look at some of the suggested streetscapes.

Note: these are working documents only, in progress sketches, and may not be the final designs. They will evolve under pressure from various factions. So how well are we moving towards the grand statement:

“Our downtown is about to undergo a transformation that will define a new identity and be the foundation for its prosperity for coming generations. The investment in Light Rail Transit will open and sustain a new pursuit of civic and national pride in the urban quality of our capital City. Our downtown streets will be reoriented to favour and comfort pedestrians, cyclists and transit users, recognizing that all travellers end and start their trip on foot. With this healthy and active orientation, our streets themselves will begin to be praised as among our city’s most coveted public spaces that in turn spark investment and that are befitting of the highest quality of buildings and open spaces along them”.

Queen Street will be a key street to the future. Currently the only two-way street downtown, it is a fairly claustrophobic, narrow canyon. It is a minor street destined to become the main pedestrian experience. The north sidewalks are very narrow east of Bank Street. The exit stairways and elevators to the underground stations will come up in what is now the parking lane on the south side of Queen (pic below).  There will be loss of some on street parking and planners have to figure out how to disperse crowds of 5000 people per hour. The sunny side of the street is the north side.

The sketch below has been marked up in a workshop focus group. The north parking lane is gone, replaced by wider sidewalks and pedestrian amenities. The south side parking lane is now paved in the same material as the sidewalks, and may even be at the same level as the sidewalk, separated from it by removable bollards, so that the parking lane can be incorporated into extra-wide sidewalks for events like Canada Day. Cyclists mix with traffic; and in the distance you can see a typical stairway entry to the LRT just beyond the two parked cars. Street furniture (ie mail boxes, benches, light posts, signs) will be all aligned with the trees to maintain the clearest possible sidewalks.

 

Two blocks north is Wellington. In the working sketch below (and remember, no decisions have been made…) there is a two-way bike lane suggested on the north side of Wellington. This helps make a more complete network of bike-friendly streets in the downtown connecting the major tourist points (bixi-bike tourism) and the major paths that approach the downtown but seldom connect with each other (this bidirectional bike lane would connect the Confederation Boulevard bike circuit, to the Alexandra and Portage Bridge bike lanes, etc). The two way path alignment was selected to minimize conflict with turning vehicles (the north side has few turn opportunities, and will apparently have fewer in the future as the Parliament Hill security perimeter expands) and to preserve sight lines to the Hill. Eastbound buses (and the whole STO route problem/scenario remains unsolved as yet) will stop at the curb; but what about westbound STO buses and tour buses? Tour buses in particular want to deliver passengers as close as possible to the destination. Bus riders may be let off onto islands between the bike lanes and bus lanes, but total available road width is a constraint. Double left turn lanes may be a thing of the past. The suggested public space configuration in the sketch will help remove the sense that Wellington is a huge barrier separating the downtown and Parliament:

Albert and Slater will be changed drastically once the main bus routes are removed. It seems uncertain just how many fewer buses will be there.  Some objectives along these streets are to integrate the public sidewalk space with the building setbacks and available private spaces along the street. Intersections will get much wider crosswalks. The parking lane is on the right side of the street, paved to match the sidewalks. It would not be a rush hour traffic lane. There would be bulb-outs at the intersections and midblock locations for trees. The bike lane is on the left side of the street, placing the cyclist close to the vehicle driver’s field of view and not hidden on the “far side” of the vehicle. There may be opportunities to squeeze in delivery bays between the bike lane and traffic lane. But essentially, the bus lane space has been given over to non-vehicular uses. Remember, though, that bike lanes have a higher capacity than car lanes.

The only north-south street that has been sketched out thus far is Metcalfe, and only north of Sparks. No analysis has yet been done for O’Connor, Kent, Lyon, etc. And as far as I could tell, they hadn’t yet addressed what to do south of Sparks. Frequently suggested is returning the streets to two-way status, the traffic planning fad of one way streets being largely past its acceptable date. Such a major change is beyond the mandate of the Downtown Moves plan. When examining the N/S streets, several new factors come into play. First, most of the parking spaces north of Queen are closed much of the time for security reasons. They can be repurposed a bus loading zones or para-transpo zones. Tourists walk slower and in wider groups than office workers, so the sidewalks connecting Sparks to the Parliamentary precinct should be wider. Then we might as well continue the wider sidewalks down to at least Albert to help disperse the commuter hordes arriving from the LRT stations. These north-south streets are also major locations for street vendors, so might as well plan for them now.

What’s next?

The Downtown Moves teams will be refining the sketches/scenarios for public space downtown. They have to run them by the traffic people to assess what it does for vehicular movements, goods movement, safety, special access needs, security, taxis, etc. They have to run them by the various downtown private sector groups, such as hotel owners, office building managers and owners, etc. They do have numerous photo examples of similar changes done successfully in other cities.

Hopefully, with continued leadership from the politicians (ie, no wavering in face of NIMBY’s who might lose a parking space or who believe cars rule) there can be a balanced discussion and evaluation of the transportation and urban design possibilities.

The Downtown Moves team will read the comments you make to this post, so fire away. And tell your councillor if you like the direction the study is moving, but save him or her the nit picky details as the study is still early on. We need to encourage the process towards a better downtown and not bog it down.

Even further down from the Summit

Mayor Watson repeatedly used the word “certainty” when describing urban planning, infill, intensification, etc. And Councillor Hume certainly used certainty a lot too.

While certainty might be an admirable destination, I see a number of bumps on the road.

Some of this comes from the bureaucratic tendency to want to prescribe things in ever more detail. And community associations lead the chorus in demanding new fine print in the rules, hopefully for a better neighborhood and not simply to trip up developers, although I too-frequently hear that second motivation.

But the more detailed the rules, and the more rules in the more bits of legislation and development process, certainly leads to more layers of plans that need to be coordinated and made compliant with each other, so that someone can read one rule (eg, zoning for the lot down the street) and be certain that there isn’t another rule elsewhere that contradicts it. I already think too much of our planning effort goes to ticking little boxes on detailed regs and not enough on the big picture.

And the more detailed the rules, the more similar all new developments get, which leads to charges of boring developments. As one developer at my workgroup table complained, he gets to choose from a very few templates for his subdivision, and God help him if he trys to something better, or unique for that location, or that responds to a local need, because then he is a six to twelve month whirlpool of special effort and approvals.

Maybe, just maybe, certainty can be better promoted by having fewer rules and less details and more dependence on what our stated objectives are? IE, certainty should be at the OP and neighborhood plan level, and not so much at the zoning and development approval detail level.

And, I wonder how well the new Centretown CDP should fare in this new era of certainty. Because the Centretown plan calls for higher buildings in some areas, but wants to leave the zoning at the lower heights, so that each proposal that meets the plan objectives will also require a rezoning. So just how certain IS that zoning your lawyer checks for you when you buy your house?

I won’t get into the moral pit of a stated reason for leaving the zoning at one level while the CDP calls for higher buildings: to collect Sec 37 money.

Down from the Summit

Yes, I attended the Mayor’s Summit. Nothing totally earth-shaking. Everyone — including developers — singing the same tune of vibrant street level facades. Even Diane Deans, of Gloucester Ward, emphasizing how much she opposes road widenings (in her ward) (beyond four lanes).

The afternoon speaker, Jeffrey Tumlin, was on transportation. He maintains that transportation planning is urban planning, since one shapes the other, twins locked in an embrace (to the death?).

He explained the futility of road widening to fix congestion. The widened road fixes the problem for a short time, then traffic volumes grow. Some of the growth is because of urban growth, and some of it is induced because it is now easier and most efficient to drive more (externalities aside). Ergo, it is futile to widen roads. So don’t even try.

None of that argument is new to anyone following planning issues. But I did start thinking more about the argument afterwards.

To some considerable degree, there is a lot of circularity in the argument. First, it depends on defining road widening as “solving” road congestion, which it doesn’t, after a period of time elapses. But it did, in fact, solve the congestion problem for the period of time the road supply exceeds the demand. AND, the new congestion level is at a higher volume than previously. So for a motorist, the road widening worked to address congestion for a time, and then continues onwards to handle more traffic than before. So from the motorist point of view, the road widening is definitely worthwhile.

Now recast the argument for transit. Our bus transitway is congested. We will spend $2 billion to convert a portion of it to LRT. And there is a lot more LRT to build after that. When the LRT first opens, there will be faster transit travel, which will attract induce more transit users. Our system opens in 2017-18, and may reach capacity as early as 2030, ie in just 12 years. At which point we are back to the same congestion we had before, but at a higher volume. So more transit spending is required.

From the motorist point of view, this is the same futility argument as transit proponents/smart growth advocates use to deride road widenings. Spend more >volume grows >congestion returns >need for more expansion. And of course, most motorists that do not use transit feel that everyone drives but a minority use transit, which has to be subsidized (to the extent there is insufficient fare box recovery). So should we even try expanding transit?

This little blog post isn’t designed to discuss all the factors and ramifications of smart growth vs [dumb?] growth, externalities, sustainability, etc etc so please don’t exercise your fingers pointing that out.

The summit was designed to bring people together, to network, and to think. And my little brain fart from the summit is that the futility of expanding road argument, which seems so logical to smart growth proponents, is remarkably similar to what I imagine many motorists think about the futility of expanding transit.

Windows on the world

Buildings must be interesting on the ground floor, that’s one of the key principles of a vibrant city at the sidewalk level. Too many of downtown Ottawa’s buildings are dead at the ground floor.

That’s what makes the Delta Hotel’s renovation of their downtown property so exciting. They are busy tearing off the solid concrete walls of the Skyline  Crowne Plaza Delta and replacing them with windows, windows that actually allow people on the sidewalk to see into the building.

In case you can’t remember, here’s what it used to be:

I remain unthrilled with their Lyon Street facade, though. While no one will miss the awful ramp up to the second floor front doors, the new design may not be all that much better, as it will still have a 100% vehicular front yard. All the windows will be nice, though.

Above: the old Delta. Below, what they are building. Note the isolated pedestrian walk between the parking/drop off zone and the busy street:

 

Here comes the sun

There is a newish condo building downtown. Very high end. The ground floor isn’t, that is to say, the building really starts one floor up and the floor at the same level as the street is windowless and contains lockers, parking, or something to be hidden behind large concrete planters that are higher than a human is tall. A bit like the Maginot Line.

The high planters have rows of dense shrubs planted along their bases. Rows of identical shrubs, not for the enjoyment of passing pedestrians but designed to be seen at a glance from speeding cars when only a large mass planting can be glimpsed and there is no time for details.

And in the midst of this landscaped space, there is a strange sign of civilization. Someone has been tramping down the shrubs a bit to sit on a low bit of wall that faces south. Oh, the warmth of the sun shining on a human amidst the concrete highrises. One little bit of unorganized, unplanned-for non-conformity. Life in the City.

Walking is for the Rich

The Elizabeth Bruyere Research Institute and Cdn Institute for Health Research have done a study on walkability in Ottawa, with a special focus on older people. Here is the title of the study; interested persons are advised to read the whole thing and not just the excerpted bits that follow:

 

Tgrant@bruyere.org.

In general, I would have expected pre-1945 neighborhoods, with sidewalks on most streets and nearby stores, to have been more walkable than suburban areas where distances discourage walking and retail is auto-oriented. And I would have thought that most downtown neighborhoods would rate similarly.

I was wrong. Very wrong.

The study was conducted by Theresa Grant, a post-doc. She studied the neighborhood differences of urban form and socio-economic status (SES) and how they affected walkability. She selected four neighborhoods. When looking at the four neighborhoods in the chart below, guess which neighborhood is which. And whether your neighborhood is one of them:

Just to be clear, she has selected a rich and poor inner city neighborhood, and a rich and a poor suburban neighborhood. In the table below are the characteristics of each neighborhood, with respect to the percentage of seniors, the number of well educated people, the average household income, and the percentage of households below the low-income cut-off line (a commonly used proxy for “poor”):

 

While the numbers of seniors was roughly the same for all four neighborhoods, the other factors varied dramatically. Despite claims that people like diversity and mixed-income neighborhoods, in practice they sort themselves out by educational attainment and income. Look at the two inner-city neighborhoods, which are adjacent each other, where the lower SES neighborhood has less than half the income of the richer.

And especially notice the similarity of the inner city rich to the suburban rich, and the distinct shortage of LICO households in the richest areas, including the fabled diverse inner-city areas. (If I may hazard an opinion, not researched in this study, many of the low income households in the rich areas will be students (educated but temporarily lower income) or middle class retirees who have lower income but substantial assets such as real estate. There are differences even amongst being poor.)

So have you made your guesses as to which neighborhood is which?

For the inner-city areas, the rich are in the Glebe, the poor are in old Dalhousie Ward, coyly named West Centretown on the map above. For the post-war suburban form of urban area, the rich are in Beaverbrook and the poor in Carlington. Carlington includes the neighborhoods south of the Queensway and Carling Avenue, south of Westgate mall, and east of Fisher and including both sides of old Merivale Road before one gets to the experimental farm.

In the chart below, the key urban form differences are noted, and low and behold, the advantages and disadvantages of urban form were positive in higher SES neighborhoods and accented negatively in the lower income SES:

 

So lets see what Dr Grant found out in some detail. As the chart below shows, your odds of being run over by a motor vehicle varies with income. In the chart, the safe Glebe is column 1, dangerous Dalhousie is column 2; and the relationship holds true for Beaverbrook in column 3 vs Carlington in column 4. In short, lower income people are twice as likely to be run over as the rich.

 

 

So, why are the rich more likely to live to walk another day, and the poor more likely to go splat? One of the reasons is that the Glebe and Beaverbrook have fewer trucks. For some reason, trucks seem to be directed by the city to drive through low income neighborhoods but not the rich ones. (Possibly a coincidence?)

The urban form is a key factor in whether or not there are truck routes in your neighborhood. I suspect there is also political activism that helps keep trucks away. Are there other factors at work here that make the lets the rich pedestrian have a richer longer life than the poor unfortunates who comprise my neighbours?

In the chart above, it shows the Glebe vs Dalhousie for the inner city; and Beaverbrook vs Carlington for the post-war suburban form. The volume of car traffic does not seem to be a large factor in the longevity of Glebites and Dalhousians. But it suggests that it is for the more suburban form, where presumably traffic goes faster and of course, your odds of being killed increase dramatically with speed.

So its better to be a poor pedestrian in the inner city than in the inner suburbs.

Where you can walk also plays a factor. In the chart below, the Glebe (column 1) has wa-a-a-a-y more park space than Dalhousie; and Beaverbrook dwarfs Carlington.

 

It has been an uphill battle to get more park space for inner city neighborhoods, because the land is so valuable. In Dalhousie, we are in the process of scoring one victory for parks over roads by expanding Elm Street park to take over a bit of the Elm Street roadway itself.

Surprisingly more difficult has been trying to get reasonable pedestrian amenities along the new north-south mulitpurpose path along the O-Train (construction starts in July). It has been necessary to continually remind city staff that the path will be used by little old ladies with yappy dogs, parents with kids in strollers, etc and not just lycra-clad commuter cyclists zooming from one end of the path to the other. Calls for park benches (or even boulders to sit on), resting areas, and runabout areas are usually met with blank stares. “It’s not a park,” they say, “it’s a path.”

I guess paths are another preserve of the rich. Who knew they are such status symbols?

The conclusion of the study?   There is

  • an inequitable distribuion of walking conditions,
  • that these impact pedestrian safety, and
  • there is an associated socio-political process driving these differences.

Or, as the title of this post puts it: walking is for the rich, and the data is out to prove it.

And lastly, the study identified some factors that the elderly find particularly useful. Recall, please, that to travel across the city on the transitway/LRT can take some considerable time for the end-to-end trip. And that the very young, and the ageing population, might appreciate the occasional pit stop. But our ever-frugal LRT stations will not have washrooms (which don’t have to be in all stations, but just in certain key ones). We are saving money by not extending sewer connections to the stations. Which means most can never be staffed, or have convenience stores, etc. where staff needs washrooms let alone the travelling public. I do hope they have thick plantings of shrubbery outside the station entrances.

 

The “Other” Iconic Station viewpoint that we lost

The Confederation Square station entrance (or lack of one) is getting a lot of press.

 Earlier, the proposed Rideau Station was straddling the underside of the Canal, with the east entrance coming up at the Rideau Centre and the west entrance coming up at Confederation Square. This was called the Rideau Street station as that was its primary market, and the main reason it was pushed eastward under the canal was the sharp southward curve the track took immediately upon leaving the Rideau Station heading towards Campus:

 

The prior plans showed the western end of the Rideau station platform connected to a long, fairly convoluted set of underground corridors and staircases to come up to entrances at the plaza on the east side of the old train station, and further west by the driveway entrance to the front doors of the NAC.


(There have been numerous versions of this entrance, depending on the depth of the tunnel and its exact alignment. The pic above is to illustrate the concept).

It was from this entrance by the NAC that people exiting the door would have an “iconic” view of the War Memorial, Parliament, etc. Keep in mind that the station entrance design for the NAC location was to kept very minimal and low, because otherwise it would interfere with the motorist’s sight line from their iconic view from Colonel By Drive.

Right from the first unveiling of the Rideau Station plans, I was sceptical about the NAC  entrance. The long sinuous underground corridors to get there are confusing and  unappealing, with several 180 degree turns, 90 degree turns left and right, and odd jogs in the horizontal corridors.

And once you exit at street level, where are you? You’re on the “wrong” side of Confederation Square, you have to cross multiple lanes of busy traffic at busy time-consuming traffic signals to get to Parliament, Sparks, the War Memorial, or the Market. In short, other than a tourist directed there because of the iconic view, who would want to exit there? Is an iconic arrival viewpoint enough justification for this location?

I felt that most people  working along the west side of Elgin would find it faster and more pleasant to exit from the downtown east station, which is also closer to tourist-type destinations such as Sparks Street and Parliament Hill.  The planners at the time were clearly uncomfortable with the main tourist arrival point for Parliament et al being in the East station, a downtown office canyon (Queen Street) where there was no immediate sense of direction to the Parliamentary precinct.

The City’s projected users of the station at Confederation Square showed the following breakdown. At the time, I was told that the number of wide streets to cross or delays in crossing was not a factor in the allocation, only geographic dispersal. Obviously, walk time is not strictly related to distance, but to the time to traverse that distance, which is influenced by the delay at busy streets. About 35% of the pedestrian traffic heading south out of the station would be heading towards Elgin Street (either side) (would any head to DND via the MacKenzieKing Bridge?) and about 5% towards Parliament, Wellington Street, or Sparks:

Remember, the City has only unveiled plans for two exits for each station, which is the legal minimum required. But they expect stations to have multiple exits when actually fully built out. These additional exits come as the plans are refined and detailed, and as adjacent property owners decide how/if to connect their buildings to the stations. (The city will  negotiate rights of ways and cost sharing). I fully expect the Downtown East station to either be shifted very slightly east or have a longer underground exit carry people  closer to Elgin.

But is the Confederation Square entrance the ONLY iconic entrance at hand?

Recall that there is another iconic sight line the NCC and City’s Official Plan protect, and that is from the Ottawa River Commuter Expressway where it rises up and over the O-Train track at the Prince of Wales Bridge. This offers motorists from the west a great view of Parliament and the downtown, a view line that is protected forever.

And barely a few yards south of the motorist’s protected view point is the Bayview Station. the major transfer point for South bound LRT/O-Train services and East-West LRT services, and possibly the STO Rapibus Ottawa terminal or the extension of LRT service to Gatineau. Tens of thousands of passengers will use this station daily.

Under the plans kicked around for the first bit of LRT planning, people arriving at this station would ascend the escalators into the grand hall and have gradually revealed, to the east, a large overhead arch of the roof framing an “iconic” view of the downtown (which may or may not have actually included the Parliament building silhouette).

Alas, the City decided that preserving even a narrow view plane for tens of thousands of daily transit users was not worthwhile. For motorists a few yards north, however, it is a major accomplishment of National Capital Image Building. I guess Obama isn’t expected to arrive by LRT, only by armoured limo on the riverside highways. The escorts for his body guards, however, are more likely to arrive via the LRT, but they don’t warrant a nice view.

The City then turned its back on the remaining views of the downtown that would still have been possible from the station, even if there were some mid-rise Claridge condo towers in the foreground. The City decided it wouldn’t align the arch of the station to frame the view, then compounded it by reversing the escalator flows so that ascending riders view Mechanicsville instead of the downtown.

Yup, it takes multiple parties — the City, its Mayor, the NCC, and others, to produce such  missed opportunities. Iconic sight lines are not priceless, there may be times to not take advantage of them. And we shouldn’t locate/design whole LRT stations primarily because they offer a nifty view upon exiting. Sightlines and views are city-building tools, that elevate a place from the ordinary to the special. But the LRT first and foremost has to work as a transit system.

Are we valuing sight lines highly enough, both at the Confederation and Bayview sites? In the midst of all the noise, it’s hard to tell.