Somerset Street Reconstruction Part 8: Bridge sidewalks A

This 15-part series on the reconstruction of Somerset Street West finished with the section east of Preston with Part 7, which talked about trees and bike racks. We now turn our attention to the sidewalks on the section between Preston and Breezehill, over the O-Train tracks. Since sidewalks are pedestrian-related, this'll count as my Peds on Weds post for this week.

The drawing shown below was from the very first meeting where this project was introduced to the community. In stark contrast to the Bronson avenue consultation, the project team for Somerset West came to us with a drawing of what it looks like now, and some markers. Since then, they have worked with the community design team to make Somerset into a much improved street.

The sidewalks on the bridge weren't re-done simultaneously, so this photo of the sidewalks on the south side being broken up was taken at the same time that the forms were being laid for the sidewalks on the north side, which had been broken up quite some time before.

Unlike most sidewalks in Ottawa, the ones going over the O-Train tracks are built with reinforced concrete. This meant that they couldn't simply be pulled up by a big digger, but had to be chipped away by jackhammers. Here a few spent jackhammer tips sit amid the rebar.

CCCA News & Events March 2012

The following message was recently sent to the e-mail list of the Centretown Citizens Community Association by CCCA President Jordan Charbonneau. I've added the photos to this version. Join the CCCA and get on the e-mail list to receive 2-3 updates per month from the CCCA. Note that Images of Centretown is my personal blog and not a blog of the CCCA.

Good evening,

I hope that you enjoyed the recent heat wave that has auspiciously marked the beginning of spring. While temperatures look as though they will be more seasonable for the near future, we've certainly had a taste of the coming warmth!

I've outlined below a short summary of some of the events and initiatives of note in Centretown. More information on upcoming events is available on the CCCA website, which I encourage you to check often.

Somerset Street Reconstruction Part 7: Trees & bike racks

We've had some very summer-like weather the last few days, and the bike counter on the Laurier segregated bike lane registered 1519 cyclists on Wednesday, 2/3 of the highest daily number ever counted at that location!

That makes a good opportunity to talk about the trees and bike racks in this installment of the 15-part series on the reconstruction of Somerset Street West. Previously, in part 6 the subject was poles and signals.

In the seventeen meetings of the design committee, great persistence by the community representatives and creative thinking all around enabled many more trees to be fit into the design. A particular challenge was getting trees on the viaduct/bridges by the City Centre building, because the drainage patterns make a challenging environment for trees' chance of survival. The solution is described in the next post in the series, part 8*, but this preliminary diagram gives an idea of how many more new trees (the dark green circles) will be added to join the old ones (lighter green circles):

Somerset Street Reconstruction Part 6: Poles and signals

Here's part 6 of the 15-part series on the reconstruction of Somerset Street West. In the previous part, we looked at the reconstruction of the roadway along Somerset between Booth and Preston. This time, we'll take a look at the traffic signals and hydro poles in the same stretch.

You'll note that the longer posts are now shortened on the summary pages. You can read more about that here.

Most of the photos in this post were taken in the winter, after Eric Darwin pointed out some concerns with the traffic signal pole design on his blog, West Side Action. I took this one, showing a carefully choreographed dance between two cherry pickers at Somerset and LeBreton, in mid-February.

Even though this is a couple of blocks east of the project limits at Booth Street, it looks like the opportunity was taken to replace some of the other streetposts that had been chipped away by years of snowplows edging past.

A few small changes to the blog...

"Read More" links

I discovered Blogger has an easy-to-use way of putting a "Read More>>" link in a post to break it up, so I've decided to use it. (If you're wondering, just put "<!--more-->", without the quotes, in the html at the desired point)

This should make it easier to skim the main page and search results. I found on other blogs, really long posts with lots of photos made it hard to find what I was looking for because it was hard to tell posts apart.

I get to choose whether and where to put the break, so I'm only breaking up posts with four or more photos, with some exceptions (so, for example, all of the Single photo posts are unbroken). So far I've edited old posts back to the beginning of 2011.

The main goal here is to make the blog easier to read and use, not to drive up page views. I could also have the RSS feed only show content that comes before the break, but I've left to show the full post (so the full post will still show at Blogawa.ca.

Feel free to leave feedback on whether you like/dislike how I've implemented this.

Redirect to centretown.blogspot.ca

Blogger now automatically redirects from centretown.blogspot.com to centretown.blogspot.ca. I didn't do this, I don't like it, and I can't disable it.

The best you can do is add /ncr (no country redirect) after the ".com" when typing the address to prevent it for the current session. Searching for the "Singles" label would thus be "http://centretown.blogspot.com/ncr/search/label/Singles". More info on this change is on this blogger support page.

I don't plan to go back and edit every single link in every post to add the "/ncr", much as I wish to.

More frequent posts?

Now that I've started posting weekly pedestrian-themed posts with my Peds on Weds posts, and with the 15-part series on the reconstruction of Somerset Street West (technically outside Centretown!), I'm considering adding another regular posting day, though I'm not sure which.

The Monday-Wednesday-Friday thing started with the similar nine-part series on the reconstruction of the T&L building and stuck, even if it means many posts are fluffy Singles posts. Stay tuned, maybe I will!

Somerset Street Reconstruction Part 5: Under Chinatown (Booth to Preston)

Last time, in part 4 of the series will take a short walk down the sidewalks of Rochester and Spruce. Previously, in part 3 of the 15-part series on the reconstruction of Somerset Street West, I showed the reconstruction of the sidewalks between Booth and Preston. This time, we stay on the east side of Preston Street for the reconstruction of the roadway itself.

The intersection of Somerset Street West and Booth Street is a heavy pedestrian area, and for historical reasons is very skewed. For both of these reasons, the crosswalks are painted with well-defined zebra stripes. As of June 2011, the work was just getting started on this phase of the work, which continues down the hill past Rochester to Preston Street.

Somerset Street Reconstruction Part 4: Contemporary sidewalk design, not on Rochester

I swapped parts 4 and 5 of this series so I could put this one in as a Peds On Weds Wednesday post.

The previous post of this 15-part series on the reconstruction of Somerset Street West showed the reconstruction of the sidewalks between Booth and Preston. Rochester is the street in between these two, and I figured we could take a little detour to talk about some sidewalk work in the area, and sidewalks in general.

While the roads, sidewalks and utilities underneath them were being dug up along Somerset Street West this past summer, the sidewalks were being replaced on Rochester Street and Spruce.

Not too far north of Somerset, the old sidewalks were dug up in early September, after the rest of the block was already prepared for concrete to be poured.

At the north end of the block, looking toward Somerset from Spruce, we can see the shape of the concrete forms creating the bulbouts (which are not new to this corner).

Somerset Street Reconstruction Part 3: Wider sidewalks

Here in the third part of the 15-part series on the 2011 reconstruction of Somerset Street West, we'll follow up on the Previous post about sidewalks by marching up the hill in Chinatown. On foot, of course.

In December, the curbs at Booth Street were being laid for the new sidewalks outside Nasa Food Centre. Behind them, the old sidewalks were still in place. You can see how much more room pedestrians have been afforded on the sidewalks.

In September, the work at Rochester Street was still only a few weeks in. The sidewalks were dug up pretty badly.