Yellow dots are like loopy buttons for cyclists

(It's been a month since my last post; I'm slowly recovering from a long stint volunteering at RBC Royal Bank Bluesfest where I run the bike parking. This year we had record numbers again!)

A topic I'm eager to write about is the yellow dots on the pavement at intersections. You may recall my epic on pedestrian buttons, No Ifs, Ands or Buttons (and the follow-up supplementary post). Well cyclists have a way of activating the signals too, and what better place to describe it than the brand-new traffic control signal at Bronson and Arlington:

To recap the lowdown on ped buttons: when there is a traffic control signal with buttons, and there is a little yellow sign above the button, that means you must press the button if you want the walk signal to activate (though for some such intersections there might be some times of the day or week when the signal changes on a fixed timing whether or not the button is pressed).

3D Thursday: Hydro pole hole

In advance of the upcoming reconstruction of Gladstone Avenue starting this summer, Hydro Ottawa is replacing the hydro poles along Gladstone from Cartier to Bank. Here, five buckets hoisted by three cherry picker trucks are holding workers as they anchor the fixtures for a replacement pole at O'Connor:

It's a tricky job, because they need to put the new pole in right next to the old one, dodging the wires along the way. To do this, they need to dig a hole for the new pole, using a big 'badger' vacuum truck. I took a 3D photo looking down into one of these holes:

Source photos for the 3D images:
Left, Right

In case you're wondering how deep those wooden poles go beneath the ground, here's a pole on Wellington West in Hintonburg where they dug out underneath the sidewalk, leaving the pole and sidewalk in place:

Since I know you're wondering, construction on Gladstone isn't supposed to start until mid-July at the earliest.

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ]

Minto Park Sale tomorrow: BBQ, Plant Sale, e-Waste drop off and more!

The annual Minto Park Sale is tomorrow (Saturday, June 15, 2013) from 8am to 2pm in Minto Park on Elgin Street.

A new record of 75 tables have been booked by people selling their household items, crafts, art, etc.

The CCCA will be renewing its suite of popular activities, including the electronic waste drop-off, where you can bring your broken/unwanted electronics to be safely recycled without charge--also raising funds for the community! A full list of what can be dropped off is on the Recycle Your Electronics website. Let's see if we can collect more old Centretown electronic junk than we did at our last e-waste drop off in October!

The CCCA barbecue will be back again, with yours truly as grillmaster, and I'll be firing up two grills this year! In addition to the hotdogs and veggie dogs of the last four years, we'll also have sausages from the Glebe Meat Market, and there'll be grilled onions this year to top them off! Service starts at 10am.

There will also be two specialized CCCA activities in Minto Park during the sale, the annual plant sale to raise funds for the CCCA Tree Fund...

...and a bake sale to raise funds for the Minto Park Games Tables project.

We'd greatly appreciate your help with any of these initiatives, even if you just show up for an hour or two, to help sell and serve the dogs and to help promote the community association and recruit new members.

If you're not into that, at least come out to the sale to get some great finds!

Note: the annual Minto Park Sale is organized by Councillor Diane Holmes, in whose office I work.

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Google Charles View

Google Street View first launched in Ottawa in October 2009, using photos taken in the spring of that year.

In summer of 2012, they came back to take more photos, and these started to go live this past winter. This time around they used branded cars so you knew they were Google Street view. I saw them a few times myself, like here on Wellington Street in late April 2012:

When you view that location in Street View, it does say that the imagery is from April 2012, but clearly from a different day since the weather and traffic are both different.

However, there were some other spots where I saw (and hastily photographed) the Google Street View car where the corresponding images also captured me. Here's the Google Street View car on Gladstone Avenue at Bell Street:

And here's the corresponding photo of me in Street View, a few seconds before I noticed the Google car was there:

Here's another sighting, on Kent Street around Gloucester and Laurier on a mid-April morning in 2012. I had chased it for a couple blocks, tying to get close enough to photograph it. The only two photos I did manage to get are pretty blurry:

I had to get to work, though, and it caught a photo of me peeling off at the Laurier Segregated Bike Lane:

But by chasing it for a couple blocks, I had inadvertently managed to get my picture taken a number times by Google Street View.

It gets better: because I was chasing the Street View car but never quite catching up to it, when you click on the arrow in the above Street View shot to move the view south, I'm still in the same part of the frame for a number of shots until here:

Fun ;)

While we're on the topic of maps, check out the City's new GeoOttawa Maps. These replace the less-user-friendly eMaps, and have a number of new features, including:

• Click "I want to..." at the top and then "View the historical air photos" to see aerials of Ottawa as far back as 1958! (Some of which were used by the URBSite author for this recent post)
• Click on a property to bring up a property report, including a link to the zoning for the site
• Click the little yellow street view icon on the left above the zoom bar and then click a spot on the map to go straight to that location in Google Street View (although it takes you to a limited-feature version of Google Street View hosted by the City)

Yellow again

It's been a couple years since I last posted photos of yellow houses in Centretown, but this little one on Gilmour just east of Salisbury Place, in the Golden Triangle, is just so adorable, with its green trim:

It's a bit dominated by the also-well-kept house next to it, not to mention the highrise of 20 Driveway looming behind it.

Over in the west part of Centretown, on Florence Street, is another yellow house that had escaped my 2010 inventory:

I recently noticed on Holmwood in the Glebe a house that bears a striking resemblance to the first yellow house I blogged about, which was on Arlington. Perhaps this one on Holmwood is what the house on Arlington could have looked like in an alternate universe.

Another yellow-ish house in Centretown is the Embassy of Armenia at Delaware and Robert, which is also notable as it's part of Doors Open Ottawa 2013.

I likely won't get around to a standalone Doors Open post this year, so this will have to do. Find all the info you need at ottawa.ca/doorsopen, or get a hard copy of the guide at your local Bridgehead. Doors Open 2013 will be this Saturday and Sunday, June 1-2, 2013.

Peds on Weds: Sidewalks for drivers

While attending the opening of the new O-Train pathway two weeks ago, Walk Ottawa co-chair John Woodhouse alerted me to a sidewalk issue on Young Street , the end of which was hosting the pathway opening ceremonies.

It seems that when the City switched from parking meters to Pay & Display machines a couple years ago, they repaved the sidewalk west of Preston on the north side of Young Street with asphalt, and put in pads at the road level for the P&D machines:

As John demonstrates here, you can't really get past that on a wheelchair. Not only isn't it wide enough, but it's so slanted he'd fall right into the machine.

Not that the sidewalk is good for anything but the car parkers. It ends before getting to the cul-de-sac, with a sheer curb..

Since it's the parking/traffic department that created this problem, we'll be following up with them to fix it.

More on the O-Train pathway is available on Eric Darwin's West Side Action, and on my blog series on the Somerset Street West reconstruction, starting with this instalment.

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]

Bronson and Somerset still closed

Construction on Bronson Avenue resumed a while ago, with the Somerset and Bronson intersection closed from the beginning of April to the end of May. Other work has also been going on, such as the finishing touches of the segment south of Somerset, in particular the sidewalks and landscaping between MacLaren and Gladstone (which Eric Darwin has recently blogged about). The impact on Chinatown can be expressed in this single photo:

This next picture gives a bit of an idea of why the intersection has to be closed for so long. There's a mess of stuff underneath that needs to be replaced. It's a three-dimensional soup of cables, wires, pipes, drains, and sewers (much of the latter were installed late last year and over the winter).

3D Thursday: 1966 Batmobile at Ottawa City Hall in 3D

This mornming, the Batmobile is visiting City Hall as a publicity stunt for Ottawa Comicon, and will be at Marion Dewar Plaza at 11:45am. I grabbed a 3D shot of it as it was being prepared for its appearance. Click for full size:

I also tweeted a photo of four By-Law officers (including a By-Law supervisor) eyeing the car, but none of them were up to giving it a parking ticket.
[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ] [Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]