Are you on the wrong Communauto plan? This free tool helps you find out!

After a lot of number crunching in January, I learned that I could have saved $546.01 on my Communauto bills in 2025 if I had been on a different plan! I built a free tool, Communauto Cruncher, so you can check your plan too. I built out most of it in January and February, then sat on it. Communauto recently sent out some communications requesting feedback, so I'm releasing it now.

The tool is built in Google sheets. If you just want to use it, click the Communauto Cruncher link and follow the instructions to open the latest version and make your own copy. Otherwise, stick around for the story of why and how I built it.

When car parking becomes bike parking

A couple weeks ago, I was asked on Mastodon (the only social media where I'm active any more) for photos of car parking spaces converted to bike parking corrals. I figured I'd compile them into a blog post, as it's the kind of thing I used to blog about.

Post by @ellie@ellieayla.net

View on Mastodon

As it turns out, most of the examples I know of in Ottawa are actually onstreet car parking space conversions, and most of the photos I have of them will be in a large unsorted digital pile of photos. But I have two examples that fit the bill closely, and a bunch of other interesting examples:

Wellington Street Part 12: 50 Years of Rapid Transit in Ottawa

Part 12: 50 Years of Rapid Transit in Ottawa

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• NCC Boost and Interprovincial Bus Loop
• Regional studies lead to first bus lanes
• Preston Street Extension
• What of the Albert-Wellington spaghetti?
• Context for rapid transit
• References

I wanted to pick up the narrative of Wellington Street to line up with an important milestone in Ottawa transit history: the 50th anniversary of bus lanes in Ottawa. It doesn't involve much in the way of the theme of this blog series—the connections, disconnections, and renamings of Wellington Street—but there is a dash of that. Alas, I missed the 50th anniversary for this blog post (by over a year!) but I did get a September 2023 article on the topic published in the Centretown BUZZ newspaper.

In the previous post in the series, we left off with the 1974 opening of the Portage Bridge, connecting the west end of Wellington Street, at the Ottawa River Parkway, to Hull, and severing Wellington Street from itself in LeBreton Flats. Today, we'll rewind a couple of years to look at how rapid transit in Ottawa began to reshape traffic patterns on the various Wellington Streets, such as here on the Ottawa River Parkway:¹

Wellington Street Part 11: The Portage Bridge

Part 11: Portage Bridge

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• Options for crossing the Ottawa River
• Splitting Wellington again
• Finishing touches
• Bridge name, location decided
• Construction begins
• References

The Jane's Walks Ottawa walking tour festival takes place this weekend, with a launch event picnic dinner under the Booth Street bridge at Pimisi Station today from 6-8pm. This year's festival theme is Building Bridges, which fits in very well with the next section of my blog series on the many traces of Wellington Street: The Portage Bridge.

In the previous post, Part 10, we took a step back into the NCC's rearrangement of land and roads in LeBreton Flats in the 1960s. This resulted in the splitting of Wellington Street ending just west of Bay Street as it turns into the Ottawa River Parkway, and connecting to itself via offramps, as we can see here in this photo:¹

That arrangement would be relatively short-lived.

The skinny on sidewalk design in Ottawa

Thanks to the Ottawa Lookout, I learned that today at the City's Transportation Committee meeting, Councillor Shawn Menard has a motion in relation to an ongoing review of sidewalk designs.

Since I currently have a cold, I can't present in person, so instead I wrote out a presentation to Transportation Committee. I'm reformatting it here, as a more concise rewrite of my 2014 blog series about Ramp style sidewalks (or "Toronto-style sidewalks", as they were called then).

Wellington Street Part 10: Nepean Bay and the Ottawa River Parkway

Part 10: Nepean Bay and the Ottawa River Parkway

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• Nepean Bay Infill
• Ottawa River Parkway
• Closing Britannia Terrace and other streets
• References

In the previous post, we talked about the peripheral effects on Wellington street from the Garden of the Provinces construction, the LeBreton Flats expropriations, and the lowering of the C.P.R. Prescott Subdivision (all NCC projects).

Today's post will look at the Ottawa River Parkway, whose history is not well documented insofar as it affects Wellington Street. We're still in the 1960s, prior to the breakup of Wellington at the viaduct covered in part 8.

To get us situated, this colour photo from the early 1960s shows Wellington Street winding up from the bottom of the photo up across the viaduct, through LeBreton Flats, and into downtown:¹

What to expect when you go Next Door in Ottawa

We interrupt the blog series about the history of Wellington Street to bring you this informational item.

In late January or early February, I got a letter in the mail (since discarded), addressed to "Dalhousie neighbour" (red flag #1), inviting me to something called "NextDoor Dalhousie", which claimed to be a social media site to "connect with neighbours". Sounds nice enough, but obviously somebody's making enough money off of of this "free" app to afford to mail out physical invitations. I've since discarded my letter, but here's a similar one received by a neighbour on Eccles Street in March, 2022:

The top level takeaway—in case the reference to red flags wasn't clear enough—is don't bother signing up, but for the sake of others who, like me, wanted to know more about it before signing up, here's what I've observed after having been signed into the site for a month.

Wellington Street Part 9: The NCC's distractions (early-mid 1960s)

Part 9: The NCC's distractions (early-mid 1960s)

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• Sparks disconnection and the Garden of the Provinces
• LeBreton Flats Expropriation
• The Queensway and the CPR trench
• References

In the previous part of this series about the renamings, connections, and disconnections of Wellington Street, we looked at the Ottawa Journal campaign leading up to the August 1969 viaduct transplant that broke Wellington Street apart over the tracks to connect with Scott. Today we'll skip back a few years now to look at what the NCC was up to around Wellington Street in the early 1960s.