Jane's Walk Ottawa 2014 this weekend

This weekend (May 3-4, 2014) is the annual Jane's Walk Ottawa series of free urbanist walking tours, and as with last year, I'm publishing a list of walks in Somerset Ward.

I mentioned two of the walks I went on last year in my blog posts The Lonely Elm (Dennis van Staalduinen's walk on Wellington Street, who this year is giving a walk in Champlain Park) and The stones don't fall far from the hill (Quentin Gall's talk on Ottawa's Building and Monument Stones), both of which seem to have been one-offs.

Here's the rundown of Jane's Walks in Centretown for this year:

Peds on Weds: Part 4: A history of sidewalk design in Ottawa

Today for the fourth and final entry of the sidewalk-design series, I'm going to give a history of sidewalk design, starting at the establishment of the original City of Ottawa, in 1855 (and earlier!). In part 2 of this series, I already gave a "little history" of the Toronto-style sidewalk design, relating specifically to how they became standard back to the establishment of the current amalgamated City of Ottawa in 2001. This followed part 1, in which I described "Toronto-style" sidewalks and the problems they're meant to address, and part 3, in which I discussed some of the issues the Toronto-style sidewalk itself has faced.

Today's entry starts with the West Ward Market, built in 1848 by Nicholas Sparks. This was used as Ottawa's first City Hall, roughly where the NAC is today.

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The first municipally-built sidewalks in Ottawa actually predate the City of Ottawa's 1855 incorporation: by-law number 37 of the Town of Bytown, approved the 23rd of September, 1850, was "To authorize the expenditure of £75 in making a Plank Sidewalk, S. side York Street":

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)

Centretown time capsule: August/September 2007

Happy Labour Day everyone!

For today's post, I want to do something a little different. I wanted to give a snapshot of what was happening in Centretown five years ago in August and September 2007. With a high proportion of renters, many Centretown residents—even those active in community affairs—weren't here five years ago (nor was this blog!). For the rest of us, it'll be a trip down memory lane.

The 2007 Labour Day parade, organized by the Ottawa and District Labour Council, ended as usual at McNabb Park for the annual festival with free hotdogs, corn on the cob, and other attractions (if you're reading this post shortly after it goes up, head out there now! They should be there from the end of the parade until 4:30pm). You might recognize this photo of the wading pool as one of the four at the bottom of the CCCA's 'promo cards':

September 2007 marked the official opening of the Corktown Footbridge on the 11th (the bridge opened to traffic the previous September). Municipal politicians and interpreters in 1830's period dress were there to cut the ribbon.

Fire at Arlington Bed & Breakfast

[Last Wednesday's lengthy pedestrian pushbutton post was followed by a Walk Ottawa meeting in the evening, where all two hours were spent grilling two of the City's traffic operations managers about pedestrian signals, and I think we could use a break. So no Peds on Weds post today.]

On Monday night, the power went out in much of the south-west section of Centretown (roughly 417 to Gladstone, Bank to Bronson), which was the first indication to many that something was amiss. To my recollection, this is only the second time this section of Centretown has lost power in the six years I've lived on Gladstone.

After hearing fire trucks go by and checking the Twitter feeds of Ottawa Fire Services Public Information Officer Marc Messier and Ottawa Citizen reporter Meghan Hurley, I quickly learned that there was a raging fire at 511 Kent Street, the Arlington Avenue "Bed & Breakfast":

A big crowd of neighbours were out watching the flames still shooting from the roof, likely motivated by the power outage and Summer-like weather at sunset. Police closed off Kent Street and Arlington Avenue in the two blocks in either direction on both streets. Here a firefighter is near the top of Ladder 13, which is extended between 511 Kent and the next house up.

Snow Removal on Kent

One night back in January, I happened upon a snow removal crew on Kent Street. I had a few minutes to spare, so I stuck around to watch and take photos. It's quite a feat of choreography, which happens several times each winter on Centretown's main roads, and at least once or twice per winter on our narrow side streets, too. With a decent snowstorm forecast, today seems like a good time to post these photos.

A day or so prior to the snow removal, temporary signs are stuck into the snowbanks prohibiting parking between 7pm and 7am (or 7am and 7pm). Right before the crews come by, a truck will collect most of these signs for re-use.

The process documented here, which spans about 20 minutes, starts with a loader, which moves much the snow away from the larger surfaces along the curb. All of this happens while traffic continues to flow, although since it's generally done in the middle of the night, the traffic is light.

A smaller plow goes around after the loader to get snow out of the smaller corners on the sidewalks. In the foreground, a coating of ice on the hydro pole cast a neat reflection of the light.

Kent Street blue trees

A nice little splash of colour to brighten up the winter, at the Ottawa Chinese Community Service Centre, 397 Kent Street, at Florence (formerly First United Church of Ottawa).

The centre has hosted candidates meetings in the 2011 federal and provincial elections, and celebrated the 100th anniversary of the building on December 10, 2011 with an exhibition of the history of the building.

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

Truck Pie

The Centropolis condo building under construction has had its share of controversy. Settling that has rendered the neighbouring building uninhabitable has been the most controversial, but I've been frequently frustrated by the debris, dirt, mud, gravel, and other obustructions strewn through the neighbourhood.

So with all that, I just had to laugh when I saw this.

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

O'Connor and Kent: Cross with care

It feels like I took this photo just a few weeks ago, but it was actually June 2010. The street we're looking down is Lewis (my favourite stretch along my now-famous shortcut), and the cross street is O'Connor.

Like Kent Street, the one-way traffic on O'Connor travels pretty darn fast when it gets the green light. Both O'Connor and Kent were widened decades ago to be very close to the buildings, leaving little room to see around the corner when you're at the stop sign on the cross street.

I didn't see the collision, but I suspect this is what happened to the unfortunate driver of this sedan: he looked as far as he could up O'Connor for a gap in traffic to cross at Lewis, and was slammed by the SUV coming down O'Connor far enough away but going fast enough (not necessarily speeding) to not be visible from the side street.

This was a common occurrence on Lyon Street before the speed humps were installed on it. The traffic engineers were up in arms at the thought of speed humps on an arterial road, but so many cars had crashed into the house at the south-west corner of Lyon and MacLaren that the community had had enough and political will overruled the engineers. Now Lyon still carries lots of traffic, but that traffic is calm enough for a bike lane to run alongside.

The Centretown Community Design Plan suggests looking at converting Metcalfe and O'Connor back to two-way traffic. The plan's consultants have suggested this (as well as the rest of the transportation aspects of the CDP) be investigated as part of the Downtown Ottawa Mobility Overlay, a.k.a. Downtown Moves. Now that the DOMO and its terms of reference are out, we see that Centretown isn't part of the core study area. We'll see how many resources, if any, go toward looking at the one-way streets.

In the meantime, when you're crossing Kent and O'Connor on a side street, either on a bike or in a car, be careful!

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

Post-and-ring bike rack update

Before I start, you may have heard the news that I've stepped down as President of the CCCA to work in the office of Somerset Ward Councillor Diane Holmes. I sent a message to the CCCA's members and followers on Wednesday night. If you're wondering, yes I'll still be blogging, yes I'll still be involved in community activities (perhaps even moreso), and yes I'll still be tweeting. I still want you to join and get involved with the CCCA, and to attend the AGM on October 25, 2011, at 7pm at the Beaver Barracks (464 Metcalfe, at Catherine). I won't be working regularly at City Hall until the last week of October.

With that out of the way...

I've written many posts about the City's insufficient provision of secure bicycle parking, particularly in the removal of parking meters. About a year ago, I gave the example of Elgin Street, which went from having many parking meters per block, per side, to one or two post-and-ring racks for both sides.

Back before they even started, I'd reviewed the City's list of where to put the bike racks that were left after removing most of them. In addition to noting locations where it was recommended not to replace parking meters, I also pointed out that bicycle parking shouldn't be limited to commercial areas and big condo buildings. I've often arrived at someone's place in Centretown to find that there was nothing in sight to lock my bike to, not even a street sign.

That's for short-term parking. It's even worse for many apartment-dwellers, like the ones along Frank street whose bikes were parked in the video in this post, and who don't have space in or outside their building to keep their bikes.

There is often a bike locked to this signpost on James Street at Kent, just across from St. Barnabas church:

What I suspect happened here is that someone unbolted the sign and lifted the bike over the post. Another related trick thieves use is to find a post that can be lifted out of the ground, so make sure to immobilize your wheel (i.e. don't just lock the frame to the post), and check to make sure whatever you lock your bike to is securely attached to the ground.

The number of bikes in town has grown significantly, even since last year, and these people need places to park their bikes. I've been told that a second round of post-and-ring racks is being installed soon (perfect timing given the imminent removal of the blue Velocity bike racks for the winter), and that Elgin is one of the streets that will receive them, after its recent resurfacing.

Whether this will include residential areas, I'm doubtful, but if there are people or stores you normally visit that have no secure place to lock your bike, please leave a comment!

(PS: As part of the Rescue Bronson Avenue project, I'll be meeting with the consultants on the Bronosn Avenue reconstruction to tell them where they can stick their bike racks.)

(Subsequent edit: In October 2012, many more bike racks were installed in Centretown, including 60 or so along Gladstone, which didn't have parking meters to begin with! Apparently the comments I had submitted a year or so earlier were consulted.)

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

Kent Street Quadruplets

I generally avoid Kent Street, as it's not a very people-friendly place ever since they widened it and cut down the trees for the introduction of trolley-buses.

The downside of this is that I miss little gems like this foursome of old houses between Somerset and Cooper. It looks like they were all built as exact duplicates of each other, and many of the original features have survived, despite each house taking on its own unique identity.

The Centretown Traffic Calming Plan (an electronic copy of which apparently does not exist) has made Kent a bit more hospitable to use, the little bulbouts and dying trees aren't enough to make it actually look nice.

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

Downstairs coupling

Seen back in April, under the Plaza Bridge, on the stairs connecting the canal level by the Union Station to the upper level by Major's Hill Park.

The channel running down the middle of the stairs is to make it easier for people to walk their bikes up and down stairs. Being in the middle of the stairs allows you to choose to push your bike from the right or left, acccording to your preference.

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

Gladstone Sun

Last week as I was checking out the progress on the Centropolis condos, there was an Ottawa Sun balloon floating to the south. The red-and-white colours match the signs of Gladstone Auto Repair just underneath it!

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

Reflection on Kent Street

While taking some photos of the existing Place de Ville "Podium" building, which is proposed to be demolished for a new office tower at 300 Sparks (mid block of Sparks, Queen, Kent, Lyon), I also took photos of the Mariott. On my way back to my bike, I snapped a couple shots of 240 Sparks' renovated entrance on Kent (before moving on to Bank and Queen, where I snapped last Monday's post post). While I was trying to take a photo of the suspension device for 240 Sparks' new glass wall, I inadvertently got a good shot of the Mariott in the reflection.

The Podium building houses the former three-screen Capitol Square cinema, which replaced the celebrated Capitol Theatre. You can read a bit more about the Podium building at Spacing Ottawa, and in Alain Miguelez' book on the history of screens in Ottawa, A Theatre Near You.

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

80 Florence - Chinese Community Building, part 3

Welcome to the big reveal--the final part in the series on the renovations to the exterior of the apartment building at 80 Florence, the Chinese Community Building.

In the previous two parts, I covered the former look and construction progress of the tower and of the ground level.

In this post, I've got a bunch of before-and-after angles, and some other views of the new look. Here's the view in mid-construction with the now-closed Stinson & Son/Main Garage in the foreground at Kent and Gladstone, in mid-October:

And here's a similar angle last week: the exterior uses two different shades of beige and light red brick to add variety to the view. The beige is contrasted by vertical stripes of blue-green window fixtures.

80 Florence - Chinese Community Building, part 2

This is the second post of three covering the renovations to the Chinese Community Building at 80 Florence (at Kent). In the previous post, I gave some background on the building and the site, and showed photos of the progress of work on the eight-storey tower part of the building, shown below in April 2010. Today I'll be discussing the details of the lower part of the apartment building.

On Kent Street, mid-block to Gladstone, the building steps down to what used to be a gymnasium, but is being converted to miscellaneous commercial uses. By the brickwork in this late-August 2010 photo, you can see that the upper levels are already pretty far along.

80 Florence - Chinese Community Building, part 1

If you've gone by the corner of Gladstone and Kent over the last year, this would be a fairly familiar view to the north-west. The eight-storey apartment building with the scaffolding is at 80 Florence. In a three-part post, I'll share photos of the exterior renovations.

In this post, I'll go over some of the building's past, and how the top of the building used to look and progress of its renovation. In the next post, I'll take a closer look at the building's former ground-level architecture and streetscaping. In the third and final post, the big reveal of how the renovated building looks, with many before-and-after angles.

W.O. Stinson & Son Ltd., 435 Gladstone

The gas station W.O. Stinson & Son Ltd at 435 Gladstone is shutting down soon. According to the yellow sign in the window, the business is moving to 1049 Merivale Road.

Also visible in the photo is the sales centre for the condo development that will replace it--Tega Homes' Centropolis Condos. The sales centre opened this past May.

Remarkably, the proposed development is staying within the zoning, which I discussed in this post on the sites at that intersection:

The City's eMap application indicates that the area is zoned TM H(15), meaning it is a Traditional Mainstreet, which is designed to incorporate a mix of residential and commercial uses (except auto-related uses), and it has a height restriction of 15 metres. The red shading means that all four corners of this intersection have Heritage designation.

The site plan application sign on the 62 Florence Street side of the site seeks to construct a building with:

• 121 units
• 4.5 storeys (14.4 metres) on Gladstone Avenue
• 3.5 Storeys (11.0 metres) on Florence Street, and
• 126 underground parking spaces.

While the condos start at a very low price, I hear that they are ridiculously small. Many of them, I hear, were grabbed up quickly by speculators and people more likely to rent or resell them than by lower-income people who actually plan to live there.

The Ottawa Citizen's Kelly Egan had a solemn writeup of Main Garage closing in Saturday's paper (published after I'd prepared this post). He raises some other points that I'll bring up in a future post.

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

Edit: See this November 2010 post on URBSite on current and historical plans for this site.

Bowling on Wellington

This is in Hintonburg, on Wellington Street West, but noteworthy nonetheless. On a June trip on the newly re-opened Wellington Street West, I noticed that the "G" on this sign has finally been replaced.

For quite a long time, West Park Bowling's large white-on-black letters spelled out only "B-O-W-L-I-N"--here's proof, from last August (this cropped image is the best photo of it I could find in my collection):

I believe this is the nearest place to Centretown to go bowling since the Kent Bowling Lanes on Catherine closed down and got converted to mini-storage. I remember they used to have disco bowling:

[Hm... I was going to give this post the label Singles, but there are two photos too many!]

The evolution of bike cutouts

In the Previous Post, I documented the construction of the traffic island on MacLaren at O'Connor, which reinforces the "no going straight" sign while allowing cyclists to continue through. I also mentioned many design elements that the island incorporates. I'd like to explore the progression of previous generations of this type of facility in Ottawa.

One of the earliest versions of this type of traffic-shaping bulbout still around is on Lisgar at Kent, next to Hudson Park Phase I, shown here in August 2009. There are two "no through traffic; bicycles excepted" signs (one partially obscured by a "trucks turn right" sign), and there are two triangular concrete intrusions into the roadway on each side of the intersection, which together make it impossible to drive a car straight through the intersection without going over one of them. There's a bit of a dip on the left side of the near triangle, which appears to be an attempt to allow cyclists to go over it.

The next generation is a stand-alone island on the near side, on Cooper at O'Connor, next to Dominion-Chalmers United Church. People in the photo below are lining up for a Chamber Music Festival show in August 2008. The gap in the island allows cyclists to go through, while it's clear to motorists that they must turn right. Unfortunately, the "no parking" signs allow cars to block cyclists' access: in this case, the car had a disabled parking permit on the dashboard, allowing them to park in a "no parking" zone for up to three hours. The construction of this one was also pretty shoddy. It was originally just a perimeter of short concrete barriers filled in with asphalt, and the barriers would get knocked out of place, blocking the through channel. It looks like it's been repaired with a more permanent construction.

There is an even more sinister version of this on Kirkwood. As a traffic-calming experiment, they put in large bulbouts on alternating sides of the street, to slow motorists down with a zig-zag. (They tried a similar thing one year on Kent, but once the snow fell and you couldn't see the pavement markings, people just went straight, so they abandoned that idea and put bulbouts on only one side. This is why it's so hard to a safe distance up Kent when crossing westbound.)

So on Kirkwood, the roadway is designed for motorists to zig-zag and for cyclists to go straight along the edge of the road. There are a few big problems with this. As shown in the photo, cars can park in the way, blocking this route. Some park a lot closer, completely blocking the cutout. It also gets filled up very easily with gravel, leaves, sticks and other debris, which sweeper trucks obviously can't reach. Lastly, motorists on cross-streets don't expect to see anybody coming from that far away from the centre of the road. But once they built Kirkwood this way, they didn't have money to fix it, so it remains a treacherous facility for cyclists. Most cyclists I know stick to the left of the solid white line.

Another problem with the Cooper/O'Connor generation of traffic islands is that the gap for cyclists is too narrow. Too narrow to allow some wide cargo bikes, but more importantly, too narrow to allow snowplows to pass through. So instead the cycling facility becomes a snow dump, as shown here in January 2007:

The most recent island at MacLaren and O'Connor (the subject of the previous post) was built wide enough for sidewalk plows to pass through, as shown in this photo from Friday:

However, that doesn't mean they always do clear it, as shown in this shot from last November (just before the transit strike), which was prevoiusly posted in Centretown, Darkly, Under Snow:

Of course, the downside of having a wide-enough cutout is when an idiot taxi driver comes along thinking his car will fit. This driver's tires got stuffed and the tire sidewalls rubbed against the curbs as he struggled to drive through.

There's one more in Centretown, on McLeod at Bank Street. While it's dug up now as part of the Bank street reconstruction, here's what it looked like last December. You can see it's a long triangle with no cutout for cyclists.

While the signage allows cyclists to go straight or left, doing so was always tricky, because there wasn't much clearance in the opening, and you had to jog around. Right-turning motorists behind you had to be patient while you waited for both directions of traffic on Bank to be clear, while they would only need the nearest lane to be clear for their forced right turn.

In preparation for Bank Street being closed for reconstruction this summer, they removed the triangle in April to allow for through traffic. For reference, the Metropolitan Bible Church is to the right of the shot out of frame, and the Tommy & Lefebvre site is across the street on the left.

Back in November, it looked like there weren't going to be any cutouts along Bank, so I fired off some e-mails pointing out that one would be ideal at this location. In April, I was sent the following drawing showing how a bike cutout will be installed at this location. It matches well with the angle at which McLeod crosses Bank.

In general, curb bulbouts reduce the distance between sidewalks, thus reducing pedestrians' exposure to motor traffic while crossing, and they also calm traffic by reducing the lane width at intersections. These ones shown in this post have the added function of discouraging unwanted behaviour, in this case, going straight through an intersection. But there can be side effects, some of which aren't apparent until they're installed and in use. Bulbouts must leave enough room for a shared motorist/cyclist lane (minimum 4.25 metres), and if cyclists are allowed through them, there must be a track that is clear of debris and easily navigable. With each iteration, new things are tried and past failures are worked out of the design, but these are painful lessons, as the failed designs can stick around for years until the entire road is rebuilt.

Other examples of road design evolution through experimentation include concrete crosswalks and roughened crosswalks, both of which help to delineate pedestrian zones. The first kind does it visually, and the second kind audibly (car tires going quickly over it make a buzzing noise). The Mid Mod has already shown the latest iteration of the zebra crossing in front of City Hall; I might do a post sometime down the line on crosswalks at intersections.