Feuchtwangen, Germany:  the following few pictures take us through the process for returning cans and bottles in a little town in Germany. No lining up with street-savy bottle collectors, this return-o-mat is in the lobby of a large grocery store.

The gent we are stalking here has an entire shopping cart of empty Red Bull containers. He puts each one, one at a time, into the machine slot, the cans align front to back with ridges on the platform. As he withdraws his hand, a light comes on, and the cans rotate on their axis  a full 360 degrees.

The conveyor belt under the ridges then takes the object deeper into the machine where a series of swinging gates direct it to the right, centre, or left, so at least 3 bins of sorting is going on.

There is another square opening with a conveyor belt down below. I saw people with a carton of empties put the whole box on the conveyor, it lights up from the side and above, then promptly is digested somewhere in the room beyond the machine.

The machine keeps a running tally in the window of your refund, and later prints a credit note one takes to a store cashier. As you can see from this guy we are shoulder-surfing, it can really add up:

It makes sense to me to have a machine do the initial sorting and binning of the returned materials, and to administer the refund. The whole approach here struck me as rather more dignified and sanitary than the line-up I currently experience at the Somerset Beer Store [hint to the unwary: never go on blue box day in your neighbourhood....]. Plus the store hours are long, and it somehow seems logical to retur

Found space parks should be cheap, in that they don’t require a multi-million dollar lot of land. But the very nature of found space means there are utilities, pavements, and adjacent users that have to be accomodated, so the park structures might be expensive per square metre.

In Toronto’s little Italy there is a small park, split on two sides of a side street, created out of the outer boulevards, a modest street narrowing, about three foregone parking spaces. And created with love and imagination.

About 20 years ago Ottawa had imagination to use some found spaces. There is a delightful mini-park on the boulevard at Argyle-Metcalfe that outperforms many larger parks. And some street closures in Sandy Hill up against Rideau Street have grown into mature greenspaces.

Would that we could see more of these here in Ottawa.

I look forward to when Ottawa regains it lost mojo, and starts turning found spaces, including streets, into people places.

Some older city neighbourhoods like the west side of Ottawa have fairly scarce park space. The complaint is somewhat tainted by selective counting, since activists often mean City park space, and exclude NCC or other Federal space owned by PWGSC or AgriCan. Or they mean park space for organized games playing, like soccer fields, and don’t count passive park space.

And the City compounds the grief by restricting park space designation only to parcels of land owned by the city and designated for that use. They haven’t shown much interest to date in found space, which requires some creative opportunity seizing that doesn’t fit the rule book.

For example, there is a small infill park on Elm that the city was content to rebuild as is. It took a ton of pressure from the community association and persistence on the part of Councillor Holmes to expand the park into the space currently used by cars parking on the street (we wanted to go right to the centre line of the street, forcing carts to share the remaining lane, but that was a step too far). . I hear thru the grape vine that the traffic folks went ballistic at the thought of losing four or five on-street parking spaces. But the plan got approved, and now we wait to see how the additional park space will appear.

The first draft site plan from the city treated the extra space as just a boulevard, grassed, maybe treed, with benches aligned with the sidewalk. We sent back comments asking for a more imaginative use of the found space, that tied it in better to the rest of the park, so it looks as if the city walkway is cutting through a larger park. We shall see what appears…

When Preston was intensively landscaped a few years ago, the inner and outer boulevards were stuffed full of trees, benches, ped lights, and people space. In essence, some blocks of the sidewalk became long linear parks.

When we have . neighbourhoods without much parkspace, it surely makes sense to repurpose some of the existing public space (the over-supplied roads in particular) into parks. Why can’t more and more streets actually look and feel to residents like pleasant places to linger rather than utilitarian surfaces for the movement and storage of vehicles?

And this could be much cheaper than buying lots already purchased by developers for $5million, as is the hue and cry every time a new condo is proposed and neighbours suddenly discover a new-found need for lawns.

Two more innovative bits of opportunistic park planning are underway on the west side. In the new |Bayview CDP, another section of Elm, immediately west of the traffic barricade, is identified as potential conversion of road space to park space when the elderly industrial buildings are redeveloped. By keeping driveways onto the redevelopments a hundred feet or so from the barricade, the street plus the generous side boulevards can all be greened. An almost free park.

The new planters going on Somerset near the OTrain are a step in greening our streets so that everyday walking and cycling becomes a park-like experience. But getting the city to agree was tough. The parks people wouldn’t pay for it or maintain it, because its not a formal park, its a road allowance. The roads people don’t (normally) maintain park space. But a solution was found.

Tomorrow, a nice “found park” example from Toronto.

There are two main doors out of the luggage/arrivals area at Ottawa airport. The centre doors take you out to the taxi stand, car rentals, and parking garage.

The south doors take you out much closer to the OC Transpo #97 bus stop. So what does the sign above those doors say?

Yup, the airport folks direct you back to the centre doors, where you gotta run past the taxis and all that, only to walk all the way back, dragging your luggage along, to get to the bus stop shoved way out to the furthest south end of the arrivals roads.

Is this a scheme to walk-out any incipient deep vein thrombosis you may have accumulated while squished on a flight? A get-the-blood circulating by extra exercise scheme so you can withstand extreme outdoor temperatures? A plot to slight public transit? Or just plain bureaucratic carelessness?

Somerset Street carries the Chinatown designation between Bay and Preston Streets. Yet it is Bronson that is being reconstructed, and there occured much debate about what landscaping should be carried through the intersection.

Eventually, the agreement was for the Chinatown landscape to be continuous, and the Bronson one to be interrupted. And since it is Bronson being reconstructed, it means the contractors have to install Chinatown-style lights and pavers at that intersection.

Originally calling for red and white concrete striped crosswalks, budget and time constraints forced some revisions. So all-red crosswalks were poured last week:

These crosswalks may later be painted with zebra stripes, using the city’s standard white paint for road markings. Brick pavers are not used on really busy roads like Bronson due heavy traffic wearing them out too quickly.

Westsiders can be trendy. A what is trendier than a Hummer limo and a wedding banquet catered by a street vendor?

And wait, is that The Motel I spy in the background? Westsiders truly have it all.