The section of Bronson that had pedestrian walks completed last fall used the City’s traditional “roller coaster” sidewalk design, as shown above. The whole width of walk “dips” for every car crossing. Motorists gets a smooth entry to their driveway; pedestrians get a thrill ride on undulating concrete. And in winter, walk plowing is hampered by the grade changes; the surface becomes only intermittently cleared bare.

Above: The City discourages businesses along Bronson because it so hazardous for motorists to stop. In front of this business, the whole front yard is paved so motorists can cut across the walk, stop, pop into the store, and drive out again. Note the curbed planter zones before and beyond this particular location.

Above: the pull-in zone in front of this CCOC apartment building works much better. There is room for a planter, trees, and separation of the pedestrian from the stopping motorist. Rescue Bronson wanted a similar treatment for the front of the Bronson Centre, which has over the years been steadily expanding their front yard parking by chopping down a tree a year and paving over the lawn. At my last involvement, the Bronson Centre was winning the struggle to keep all its front yard parking even though the exit and entrances were awful for pedestrians. It’s all a matter of priorities and values.

Above: in the section of Bronson running north from Gladstone, under construction this spring, the City has shifted sidewalk styles. This is sometimes called the “Toronto style”. The main part of the sidewalk remains straight, level, and convenient for pedestrians. Much of the “dipping” occurs for motorists in the first 18″ or so back from the curb, in the less-walked-on utility post zone. Squint at the above walk carefully, and you can see the dip does intrude about a third of the way into the walkway. This still allows pedestrians, especially those pushing strollers, dragging carts, or in wheelchairs, to continue “on the level”. Otherwise the slope drags the wheeled object into the busy road. The City’s first experiments with the Toronto style on Hopewell and Gladstone (near Bayswater) have the dip extending over most of the sidewalk, and are terrible for pedestrians, threatening an ankle-break to all walkers and a constant, exhausting struggle to keep wheelchairs or strollers going straight.

I talked to the project / concrete foreman on the site shown above. I complimented him on keeping so much of the walkway level. He, however, was much more interested in pointing out how gentle the motorists’ slopes were, so there wouldn’t be much of  bump for them. I suspect he must work on other “pedestrian first” walks like on West Wellington, or Somerset, or parts of Preston, where the “dip” for motorists extravagantly extends 16′ or more back from the curb, while pedestrians lurch down some fairly steep street slopes made worse by paying acquiescence to the all-sacred  automobile.

There are a number of “bulb-outs” on the side streets. These serve to slow traffic leaving the faster jack-rabbit Bronson environment and entering what should be quiet residential streets. They also provide additional landscaping zones to buffer side streets from the busy Bronson, and patio space for businesses.

The space above is a generous walkway space, and allows room for some patio seating. The picture below of the same space shows how generous the protected planter zone is, buffering the walk and patio from traffic, adding green space, trees, birds chirping, and all that.

Once plants are in the planter it will be more obvious to snow plows and the back curbs  may last more than one winter.

The Bronson public right of way is so monopolized for through traffic, that in many places there was no room for trees. The planners were keen to try out these thin shelters, designed to provide shade for the benches to be plunked down thereunder. Several more of these shelters are planned for Bronson itself, where the lack of space is more apparent. Rescue Bronson wanted some of these at bus stops, since there are no bus shelters between Gladstone and Queen. Last I heard there were to be no shelters at any of the bus stops in that zone, but there would be some roofs over benches.

These roofs, for those with long memories, derived from the earlier attempt by the City to install fake metal trees on Bronson since there was no room for real ones. In addition to these roofs, several giant metal trees will be installed at the corner of Gladstone as part of the public artwork.

A number of speakers at the recent City Hall open house on the Western section of the new LRT line (WLRT) favoured the Carling route. That route has a number of advantages, including distance from many of speakers favouring it over the Richmond Road options, a belief that there is more intensification potential there, and a firm belief that the WLRT should take priority over any other future LRT routes, so if the Carling-OTrain route knocks out the attractiveness of future southward or northward LRT routes that would have otherwise used the OTrain cut, well, too bad for them.

A lot could be written on each of the above arguments. But today lets do a thought experiment. It takes a number of assumptions, and hostile readers can surely throw up a lot of objections. But if gentler readers will bear with me, follow along.

The Richmond Road options are currently costed at under a billion dollars. The Carling-Otrain option at  more than two billion. That’s OK, some people say,Carling is still better because there is more intensification potential along Carling.

But, it is also true that the Carling option is way more expensive right out of the gate. So the first chunk of intensification is required just to pay the additional cost of the more expensive Carling option. 

The cost can be calculated per rider for Richmond Road (the underground route, or green line option)  and compared to the Carling option. The cost per rider for the Carling option is 2.45 times higher than the Richmond option.

So how many new riders do we have to get on the Carling section of the WLRT * to bring the cost back down to the Richmond option?

The answer is we need 313,000 new residents along Carling. These people are going to be much more likely to use transit than the average resident, so the assumed modal split is 40% (rather than the target 30% for the city as a whole, up from today’s 23%). This assumption gives us 125,000 new daily riders. And their farebox revenue brings the cost per rider of the Carling option down to the same cost as the Richmond green line option would have.

The spreadsheet showing how that can be figured out is shown below. It is NOT my spreadsheet, and it is NOT my intention to argue endlessly with commentators as to how the equation works. Please be satisfied that I found it, and am sharing it with you.

And because the fun part is beyond the table:

So, we need 125,000 new daily riders to get the Carling option to the same cost per rider  as the green line under Richmond Road. And the 313,000 new residents along Carling coincidentally happens to be the population growth for the entire city out to 2031.

So we are going to have to ban any and all new residential construction in Kanata. And Barrhaven. And Ottawa South. And Orleans. Which probably means no more commercial construction in the ‘burbs either. Instead, every single new resident of the City between now and 2031 will have to live on Carling Avenue. And presumably we can retrain all those low-rise construction people how to build high rises, because we can’t fit all  those new residents into low rise wood-frame construction just along the Carling corridor.

The Carling corridor from the OTrain track to Lincoln Fields is about 23 traffic-lights long. I’m using traffic lights because its a number I have handy, and makes for a fairly understandable way to break up Carling into a lot of little segments.

Let’s further assume that a 50 storey condo tower can hold about 250 apartments, or 500 people. To house those 300,000 new residents, we will need SIX HUNDRED new 50 storey apartment buildings.

Assuming they were evenly spaced between the intersections, that’s 26 new 50 storey buildings between every set of traffic lights along Carling Avenue. We might actually be able to get 26 into the Carlingwood Mall site. And maybe 13 into Westgate. And six into Hampton Park Plaza.  And maybe a bunch south of the Canadian Tire, if we get rid of the industrial stuff that’s there now.

I’m afraid we might have to take out the two kilometers or so of Experimental Farm, running along the south side of Carling, to build more condos. Perhaps the Civic’s helicopter pad can be relocated to the roof of one of them.

And many of the lots along Carling are rather shallow, where the next street back is Woodroffe Park, or the south side of McKellar Park, or Carlington, or the Civic Hospital neighbourhood. Those residents will surely be thrilled by a “wall” of fifty storey buildings all along Carling.

And don’t forget, our increased modal split wasn’t just because the residences along Carling were nicely along a transit line. Carling simply cannot handle the 60% of residents that will drive to work (180,000 vehicles/day…). I guess they’ll have to drive north to Richmond Road or south to Baseline before heading east or west.

And for the 40% who take transit, their workplaces have to also be along the transit corridor. So a high proportion of all new jobs in Ottawa between now and 2031 will also have to be on the Carling corridor. This will be the equivalent of several Tunney’s Pastures (which is our third largest employment node in the city ….). Until 2031,maybe all those jobs will be building new condos along Carling, but after that… or for people who aren’t planning to be in construction … we are going to need a lot of tall office and commercial buildings. To quote our mayor, “a lot more tall buildings. Very tall buildings.”

And once we have built those 600 new 50 storey condo towers, killed suburban growth, and figured out how to force all new residents to live in said towers, we are exactly where? Well, right back at the 2013 starting point, since all this was required just to get the Carling route down to the same per rider cost as the Richmond green line. Now, we can start exploring those intensification opportunities that are so lauded as being easily found on the Carling corridor.

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*all the new residences are put on the Carling segment of the LRT line rather than along its total length, as the choice is between the Richmond green line and the Carling line. If we reallocate the Carling intensification to the whole line, then where are we going to get the intensification we were otherwise expecting to get from building the other segments of the line?

I am trying to finish reading Saturday’s paper while it is still Saturday.

The evening air is warm, the house is warmer. Neighbours already have their central air conditioning on. I hear the unfamiliar sound as it cycles on. My ear twitches as it hears bells.

The Peace Tower bells can be heard from kilometres away on quiet nights. It is common to hear them through bedroom windows between midnight and five AM.  (My sleep can also be less pleasantly disturbed by the raucous gulls on the river, above the Chaudiere Falls).

But the bells that attract my attention tonight sound different. They aren’t counting the hour. I step outside, the sky is starry, and the bells I now realize aren’t all that familiar. Not St Anthony; nor St Francois. Not St Jean Baptiste. Not the pseudo bells of City Hall (yes, we can hear them here on cloudy days), which probably don’t ring at night anyway.

It’s Easter. Orthodox Easter. Their Christ has Risen. Some group is eager to let the whole world know the minute it is Easter Sunday. The bells ring on. It could be Annunciation Orthodox Cathedral on Eccles (formerly known as Our Lady of Perpetual Help when it was RC, I would think I would recognize its bell…). So it has to be a church that I seldom hear. Maybe the Latvian Orthodox church on Somerset at Arthur. Or the Russian Orthodox Church by the transitway in Mechanicsville. Does the Polish church down near the Queensway celebrate roman or orthodox easter? I dunno.

But the bells have stopped now, leaving just the quiet  starry night.

Real church bells are rare in the newer parts of the City. They are a major factor in the choice of my first house, under the cliff below St Jean Baptiste church on Empress, which has a big bell set, although they play it less now, and it sounds distinctly muted. Carillons are popular in some areas, but when I lived out on Greenbank beyond Pinecrest Cemetery their daily carillon sounded more irritating than stirring, sort of like school chimes that go and on, rather like the teachers at the students incarcerated therein.

I leave the paper for another day. I go to bed, listening for the Peace Tower bells, but never hear them.

I vaguely dream of my Greek-o-philia stage in life. Twice I have spent Easter in Greece. Street parades. Madly chiming bells. Sooty candles marking door posts. To refresh memories, the wife and I went to the Greek church out on Prince of Wales one Easter. It was Good Friday. About 3pm. Their bell tolled on and on, a mournful dirge. The Church was crowded, hot. I squeeze out to the entry way when a very self-important irritated neighbour from the Lord Mountbatten Apts arrives to insist they “turn off those damn bells”. The ushers, all shaped like refrigerators, push his hands to his side, pick him up, and carry him outside down the stairs. He doesn’t come back. Eventually the bells stop.

Corrugated metal siding is popular for renovating existing houses and constructing new ones. Its low cost is definitely a factor.

Sometimes when metal siding is installed it looks decidedly boring. Maybe that is intentional, for example smooth siding on a side wall that isn’t supposed to attract attention.

My liking for corrugated siding comes in part from its texture. Running the pattern in two directions or two colours can be fun, as evidenced by this picture of the Capri Pants Housing from  the previous post:

or from the checker board texture on the exterior of MEC in Westboro. Occasionally, there is the mix with smooth exterior panels, or wood grain panels:

Over on Flora Street there is an example of someone staying away from metal siding, and favouring the softer texture of plywood exterior panels:

The front porch is modernized, lightened, and softened with natural-tone wood trellis:

Variety is of course what makes a neighbourhood a neighbourhood and not just a buncha tract housing. Throw in a hundred years of ageing, renovations, conversions, abuse and salvaging, and the wide choice of materials available to property owners further accentuates the harmonious whole that constitutes west side living.