The weather was atrocious. Mind you, the design of our streets doesn’t help. Our carefully engineered sidewalks deliver the wetfoot experience to every pedestrian. Motorists are not ignored. Here are two of the puddles on Booth. Note the splash zone includes all of the sidewalk. First, the Good Neighbour comes out with a shovel to uncover the catch basin: As vehicles approach, he waves the shovel, signaling drivers to slow down. But do they? Let’s see now…   Nahh, whatever the trip, it’s ...

Faithful readers will recall the many posts on Bronson Avenue. How it is so poorly designed for motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists. And how it blights the neighborhood. Instead of lively street, the City seems determined to give us more blight, by widening the lanes 2 ', thus removing numerous trees and more front yards/greenspace, all in a vulgar attempt to get the cars to go a little bit faster. Gotta get to Greely quicker!  [*] Rescue Bronson has been nagging the traffic engineers to redesign the awful, pedestrian-unfriendly corners at Somerset and at Gladstone. You wouldn't send any kid less than about 14 to school by him/herself if you valued their child benefit cheque. You wouldn't send your mother in law out to those crossings unless you were in a hurry to inherit.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Cars, buildings. and precious few pedestrians. Photo by Canadian Tourism."][/caption] Editor's note: Part 1 of this article was posted earlier this week The City of Ottawa “Downtown Moves” process has a number of fine sentiments expressed in Council’s direction: Vibrant, safe, accessible streets for pedestrians Improve sidewalks, crosswalks, and walking routes Enhance the public realm and on-street amenities Continuous, safe, and convenient cycling facilities Framework to guide future planning To date, the planners have tried to package together the improvement ideas generated at the public forums. They distilled these into The Big Moves. Planners and engineers are problem solvers. Identifying some key streets and their problems is one approach. If the study was being run by public policy boffins and advised by policy wonks then they would come up with process-oriented measures: What do we do that generates the unsatisfactory current state and how do we fix the process to produce a better city?

[caption id="attachment_7410" align="alignnone" width="419" caption="Photo: Noah Kazis/Streetsblog"][/caption] The City is running a study to produce an integrated urban design and transportation strategy for the future of downtown Ottawa streets. The triggering factor are the circulation patterns to be caused by the new LRT stations, the removal of some/many/but not all buses, and to restore a balance amongst users (surely a reference to the auto-domination of the previous decades). The study team held workshops earlier this fall, and brought in significant guest speakers who gave well-attended ...

[caption id="attachment_7059" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Billygoat hill?"][/caption] Recall the kerfuffle about the NCC closing and then reopening the Preston “Extension”, and then closing it again, then tossing he blame to the City, then reopening it with a promise to consult better in the future? Well, the City seems to have been watching closely for lessons in how not to treat pedestrians, because suddenly last week they posted signs closing the popular pedestrian path beside Tom Brown Arena, just a few hundred metres from where the NCC ran aground on the shoals of public indignation. The paths in question are truly goat trails. They cover the slope behind the Arena and connect pedestrians between Hintonburg and Albert Street. It is a safe bet that most users are headed for the O-Train or transitway stations at Bayview.

Quick, time to employ your detective powers! Just what is shown in the above picture? Do you see two people sitting on a bench built into a planter?  Look closer, notice how thin the planter walls are; they certainly aren’t concrete. And it looks sort of hollow under the planter. And the little tag over there on the right: it says Public Parklet. What you are looking at is the first of six ParkMobiles  rolled out in San Francisco in August. Defined as “robust moveable containers with lush gardens”, they could equally well be described as “dumpster flower boxes”.  Yup, you are looking at a modified 16’x6’x40” dumpster. Each one has been planted with a different garden theme, and then plunked down in central San Fran to fill up one space otherwise occupied by a parked car. Cars are ubiquitous in our downtowns. They use up 70-90% of the public space. This ParkMobile recovers some of that space, for a temporary period, as a park. The bench effectively widens the sidewalk and provides additional amenity space, which is sorely lacking on narrow sidewalks.

[caption id="attachment_6663" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="What are developers hiding behind the curtain wall?"][/caption] Large property development firms are seldom compared to little domesticated birds. But in some ways they are canaries in the coal mines of the urban streetscape. And the song these messengers sing is not a cheerful tune for downtown pedestrians. Consider this not-so-old  downtown condo: At first glance, the landscaping is pleasant.  Other than the front door,  the rest of the ground floor is revealed to be blank walls, the utility side of the building that puts up front what used to be kept in the back. And those tiny windows open into the … parking garage. Seriously, this normally sensitive developer has decided that a busy pedestrian and cyclist street on the edge of downtown commercial core deserves exactly nothing as its ground floor. No storefront. No niche bookshop. No quiet RMT tenant. Not even a charming accountant. Nada.

The City is the prime controller of the pedestrian environment. It can make it better, a little bit at a time, and we will eventually end up with a steadily improving walk space. Or, it can chip away at the pedestrian realm, bit at a time, and slowly make it less functional and uglier. Or, it can do both: launch grand plans for major streetscaping projects, whilst simultaneously undermining the experience everywhere else. If you are pedestrian, you are well aware of the proliferation of control boxes at intersections. These power boxes seem to get bigger every year, but all the new ones I have seen inside are 85% vacant. It is so … something … to see the City planning ahead for more traffic controls. As can be seen in the photo at the top of this post, sometimes these boxes intrude rudely into the sidewalk.