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

Part 12: 50 Years of Rapid Transit in Ottawa

   [Show/Hide Contents]

• 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

   [Show/Hide Contents]

• 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 many traces of Wellington Street - Introduction

You may already know that Ottawa has both a Wellington Street and a Wellington Street West, but it was not always so simple. A man standing at the corner of Scott and Bayview in the pre-smartphone days of the early 2000s asked me for help finding an address on Wellington Street, and I had to confess that I didn't know which of three Wellington Streets to direct him to!

I'm looking mostly at YOU Wellingtons. You are unnatural and should not both exist.

— Cassie 🚲🐈 (@cfulgham) August 15, 2016

I was reminded of this recently and got curious about when these various geometric and name changes took place. I already knew that the City of Ottawa renamed many streets, including two of the Wellingtons, following amalgamation in 2001, and a quick look at an aerial photo reveals clues to how various physical changes broke Wellington Street up. Dennis Van Staalduinen tried his best to explain it on a couple of Jane's Walks in 2012 and 2013, the notes of which he has posted on his website, and a follow-up map in 2016. I even covered the topic myself in a 2010 blog post!

But these were all snapshots; I wanted the whole story. I searched my own collection of books on LeBreton Flats, Ottawa, and the NCC, and found nothing describing the actual changes to Wellington Street. I searched the Web as well, but found only the most recent changes. It turns out that anybody who's written about LeBreton Flats has been more interested in the buildings, people, and land, than on the nomenclature and alignment of its primary artery! (I jest; this is entirely reasonable)

So I took a few trips to the Ottawa Room, bought a subscription to Newspapers.com, and collected a trove of information about Wellington Street, with many twists and turns along the way. Changing names and alignments is a Wellington Street tradition that goes back to the early 1800s and most recently this past September!

Over the past two months, I've painstakingly assembled this information into the following blog series to detail everything I can find out about Wellington Street—everything, that is, except for the buildings, people, and land! Depending on how you count it, Wellington Street was officially renamed between 7 and 21 times, and that doesn't even count all the times where it got physically disconnected or redirected! I've done my best to filter out the wrong information and provide sources for the rest; corrections are welcome by email, tweet, or comment (all comments are moderated).

The first part goes up tomorrow at noon, and the rest of the 10+ parts are in various stages of development and will be posted thereafter. The posts and the headings within them will be added to the bottom of this post as they are added. But first, a quick rundown of Wellington Street:

Peds on Weds: No; more ifs, ands, or buttons

Back in May I had a lengthy blog post titled No ifs, ands or buttons which described in detail how terribly complicated pedestrian buttons are in a road environment that is designed for cars.

Since that post, I noticed a few more situations I omitted about pedestrian buttons. These examples are all at the edge of Centretown or just outside it.

Outside the fancy new Ottawa Convention Centre at Colonel By Drive and Daly on the other side of the Rideau Canal, some of the concrete pavers are lined up with grooves in the middle. This is an accessibility feature so that the visually impaired can safely direct themselves to the crosswalk safely, and stop before getting to the edge. The grooves in poured concrete sidewalks perform the same function (and most streets that have precast pavers for sidewalks will use a concrete pad at the intersection to provide these accessibility features). Can you see the problem?

The groove takes you to the centre of the crosswalk, but the buttons you need to press to activate the pedestrian signal are at the edges of the crosswalk. And this crosswalk is so wide that the button on the right side didn't even fit into the shot.

But at least at that intersection, the button is necessary for anyone to use the crosswalk—not just the visually impaired—so at least there's someone else there to activate the crossing signal. As mentioned in the May entry, this is discernible by the sign above the button on the pole. If our blind pedestrian is lucky, the sighted pedestrian will press the button for three or more seconds, activating the audible signal, instead of just the quick press required to request the crossing.

Peds on Weds: No Pedetsrian Crossing... yet

It's the second Wednesday of the month, which means two things: a Walk Ottawa meeting (7pm at Jack Purcell Community Centre room 101, also noted on OttawaWalkingProblems.ca), and the weekly Peds on Weds post.

This week's post features a jogger trying to cross the car-dominated junction of Wellington Street, the Ottawa River Parkway, and the Portage Bridge. Facing our intrepid pedestrian is a sign that reads "NO PEDESTRIAN CROSSING". Pedestrians and cyclists are expected to navigate the labyrinth of pathways under the bridge to get to the side they want to be on.

Luckily all those pylons aren't there to make an obstacle course of the surface also; it's because the intersection is being reworked. Segregated bicycle lanes will be added to Wellington in both directions, and at-grade crosswalks will be added to allow pedestrians to cross in all directions.

Construction is expected to be finished by the end of June, following which it will be much easier to walk to the Mill Street Brewpub at the old mill.

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