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:

Onramp houses on O'Connor

Christopher Ryan had a timely post on Ottawa Start about Connor Court, describing one of the low-rise apartment buildings built in the first half of the 20th Century. As he mentions, O'Connor Street is little more than an onramp to the 417 freeway all the way from the office buildings at the north end through the apartment/commercial district through Centretown.

South of a certain point, O'Connor is mostly mid-rise residential or low-rise commercial, there are a couple of exceptions. I noticed this house for the first time just earlier this month. It's 231 O'Connor, between Cooper and Somerset on the east side:

231 O'Connor is on the 1958 aerials on GeoOttawa, but it isn't on the 1902 (1912 revision) fire insurance maps (unsurprisingly, given the architecture). (Er, on closer look, it appears to also be commercial)

The same day I noticed the house above for the first time, I also took an appreciation for these two houses at numbers 312 and 314, on the west side of O'Connor just north of Frank Street:

Snow removal on Bank Street (video)

On the left, the snow accumulation on Bank Street's west sidewalk from the previous snowfall. On the right, the mostly-bare road and sidewalk minutes after the City took the same snowbanks away from the east side of Bank Street last night:

I described the process in more detail in my 2012 post, "Snow removal on Kent." In summary, some very deft sidewalk plow operators push the snow from around various obstacles on the sidewalk into the road. Then graders like this one go by to arrange this snow into a straight row on the roadway:

Then, of course, the big snow blower machine comes by to whisk the snow (and ice!) all away with ease, while a lineup of trucks follow in wait of their turn to collect the snow from the blower:

I took a video of the blower going by. Watch it in stunning HD:

As described at a briefing last week at the City's Transportation Committee, snow removal (that is, physically removing it from the road and taking it someplace else, as opposed to snow clearing, which is just pushing it aside) makes up the biggest part of the City's winter maintenance budget. Of the $11.8M spent to clean up after the December 20 storm, most ($7.2M) was spent on snow removal. By contrast, $873,000 was spent on sidewalk clearing during and after that storm, which amounts to about a dollar per person for that one storm.

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":

Peds on Weds: Toronto-style sidewalks part 3 - the downsides

There has been a fair amount of criticism of the Toronto-style sidewalk design since it was made the standard in the City of Ottawa in 2006, just as there have been various challenges implementing it. As with any standard, you can't please all of the people all of the time, especially in a constrained physical environment like Delaware Avenue, below:

In the first part of this series, I described what "Toronto-style" sidewalks are and how they're supposed to work. In the second part, I detailed the rather technical history of how this sidewalk design, also known as "ramp-style vehicle access crossing", became standard, following through minutes from post-amalgamation City of Ottawa through to 2006.

Feedback about the design started as soon as the sidewalks on Delaware (pictured above) and Holland Avenue were installed for the pilot project. Since then, the design has also received its share of criticism from various sources. Today I'll be discussing these criticisms, and other issues the standard has encountered. I'll finish the series next week with a review of alternatives, starting with how Ottawa's sidewalks have been designed through the ages.

179 Waverley update (2012 fire)

Two years ago to the month, the house at 179 Waverley Street in the Golden Triangle suffered a two-alarm fire. The following week I posted a couple of photos I took when I arrived shortly after it was extinguished. Here's another from the same photoset, of a pumper truck being emptied of water after use:

The windows were quickly boarded up. It looks from the outside like most of the fire damage was restricted to the upper floors.

3D Thursday: Snowbikes

Over at the Kenniston Apartments, which is the name of the retail/apartment complex that contains the Lieutenant's Pump, there are three bike racks used primarily by the residents.

After a mid-December snowfall, they were frozen in time:

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

I ride a bike in the winter—enthusiastically—but I understand that many people don't. If you're interested in trying, Citizens for Safe Cycling's annual winter family bike ride should be coming up sometime later this month. It's a great way to try with lots of company around, and hot chocolate with marshmallows at the end! Stay tuned to their website and Twitter for details. It's usually a Sunday late-morning in late January.

[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]

Peds on Weds: Tight squeezes on Bank Street

Street design is a finnicky thing. The City's standard clearance is 1.8 metres, and the bare minimum for new sidewalks is 1.5m. That's still pretty tight, this guy took about a minute to gingerly squeeze through this narrow channel:

Even with 1.5m though, sometimes they can't make it through. I measured exactly 150cm exactly between the tip of the 'nose' of hydrant and edge of bike rack (hope nobody parks their bike there when the plow needs to get by!)...

...but the clearance isn't straight! The slalom of three minimum-width clearances doesn't leave enough room for larger sidewalk plows to go through.

Eventually, one of the smaller, more nimble plows without the salt spreader on the back to go through a few days later.

This kind of detail can be easily overlooked in the consultations on street design, especially when many of the consultations happen throughout the Summer. Very often there are also last-minute changes to put in an extra utility box in what ends up to be a very inconvenient location.

The 1.8m rule applies not only to sidewalks, but also to bike facilities, like the bike cutout at Bank and McLeod.

179 Waverley fire

Last Monday as my lunch hour was running out, three fire trucks went past where I was eating on Elgin, and chatter on Twitter made it clear that there was a two-alarm fire on Waverley.

By the time I got down there, the fire was out and things were wrapping up.

Luckily there were no injuries in this two-alarm fire at 179 Waverley, though there is significant damage to the house. It would appear that the house next door, barely a foot away, was unscathed.

Power was still out on the block, and two Ottawa Hydro trucks at Cartier and Waverley were working on that.

It seems more common to hear firetrucks race by in the winter, but thankfully most of the incidents they're responding to aren't as severe as this one was. Be careful about how you keep your house warm, and make sure to check your fire alarm regularly!

Kenniston Apartments, Elgin Court, and the Lieutenant's Pump

Here are the Kenniston Apartments at 341-359 Elgin, spanning Waverley to Frank. The building is over a century old (a Library & Archives Canada photo dates from 1909) and contains residential apartments surrounding a court.

At Waverley, the Lieutenant's Pump occupies the split lower level of the building, which comes right out to both streets.

RIP Charles Boushey

CBC reports on the passing of Charles Boushey, patriarch of the Boushey Dynasty of Elgin Street. In 1960, he bought out his uncle's store at Elgin and Waverley, until he retired in 1989. Boushey's Fruit Market remains a staple of the neighbourhood. I do most of my grocery shopping there.

Of his sons, I know Peter the best. Peter is always friendly, and he has put in a few calls to the City about the removal of all bicycle parking outside the store this winter, including the parking meters.

The ceremony was Monday in Riverside. You can sign the online guest book for Charles Boushey at legacy.com.

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

Monitoring Birkett

It is not at all uncommon to see garbage on the side of the road outside the Governor Metcalfe apartments at Metcalfe and Waverley, but on a sunny morning commute in early June, I got a curious glimpse of Birkett's Castle (the Embassy of Hungary) reflected in a discarded computer monitor:

Urbsite has some information on the history of Birkett's Castle in the post on 408 Bank Street.

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