[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Bumper-to-bumper on our BRT - growing pains on the way to adulthood?"][/caption] Reading my friend Chris Bradshaw’s recent Spacing Ottawa opinion piece on rapid transit reminds me of the challenges of a growing family. Canada is a family of cities of various ages and therefore at various stages of maturity. Montreal and Toronto are the “older children”. They were the first ones to go through the growing pains of passing through the stages of development that children experience as they move through their teenage years and into adulthood. Because they are older, they always thought of themselves as the “bigger kids” and, like most first-borns and second-borns in large families, they were the ones who had to learn from mistakes, rather than benefit from the teachings of older siblings they never had. Ottawa, on the other hand, is one of the family’s younger children. It was cuddled and sheltered more than its older siblings and, accordingly, was spared some of the mistakes made by its older brothers and sisters. It has more green space than its older siblings. It has fewer of the harmful effects of some of the more misguided urban interventions tried by their larger siblings. It has fewer scars as a result. But just as we don’t imagine children growing from newborn to toddler to big kids while still drinking milk from a bottle or using diapers, so cities grow out of the more junior arrangements that come from the days when they were smaller. And children usually do resist, at first, things like potty training, picking up after themselves or doing their homework after school. It’s hard to grow up. It’s also unpleasant at first. And children aren’t equipped to see the richer life that awaits them once they learn new skills and take responsibility for themselves.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Subway tunnels, Seattle-style. We've been talking about getting our own since 1915."][/caption] As Ottawa takes decisive steps toward giving itself a downtown subway, it is fascinating to find that this is actually the fourth time that plans for grade-separated downtown transit have been proposed. This is typical of growing cities that have had to tackle such a major investment in transit. Montreal, for instance, first proposed a subway in 1910. It would be over half a century before the métro finally opened, in 1964. Likewise, Toronto’s first subway plan dates back to 1909. It took until 1954 to see the first trains roll. Even cities like Paris first discussed subways as early as 1854, and had to wait several decades until the first line was put in service in 1900. In Ottawa, the first subway plan dates back to 1915. In a report to Parliament, the Holt Commission noted the severe congestion of Sparks Street and arteries leading up to it, including Bank and Elgin Streets. As the drawing below illustrates, it recommended placing streetcars in a subway between Bronson and Rideau Streets, with southbound lines on Bank and Elgin. The portals would’ve been at the escarpment on the western edge, the Rideau Street intersection with Sussex at the eastern edge, and at about Laurier Avenue for the southern edges of the Bank and Elgin lines.

What better topic to kick off Spacing Ottawa than with Lansdowne Park? It has attracted a great deal of controversy and misinformation, but in looking at the future of this important municipal asset, I have sought to steer clear of the rhetoric and asked myself a few basic questions about what the city ought to consider as it ponders Lansdowne’s future. The answers I give here are my own, as a citizen of Ottawa and one who is ambitious about the evolution of this city. What should Ottawa seek to achieve at Lansdowne? Lansdowne was never intended as a park in the strict sense of the word. It has always been, and should continue to be, a magnet for people and a place of intense activity revolving around sports and commerce.