[caption id="attachment_6386" align="alignnone" width="476" caption="Double decker arrives at Westboro Station: convenient - if you can get to the platform. (Photo credit Mike Gifford)"][/caption] If you ride the transitway along Scott Street you will pass through Westboro Station. It looks pretty ordinary. But if you go up the stairs to the Scott Street level you will find a most interesting urban picture. Ignore, for the moment, the slow intensification process occurring to the south, along Scott itself. Instead turn north. There are two red brick mid-rise apartments, and a bunch of stacked townhouses, developed by the City back in the 80’s. Even though they abut the Westboro Station, they were designed   with access to Churchill Avenue to the West. No doubt some planner thought it wonderfully convenient that the inhabitants of these buildings could walk out their front doors, pat their car hood, glimpse fondly at the Westboro Station immediately adjacent, and then walk a few hundred metres to Churchill, a further few hundred metres south to Scott (crossing the transitway en route), then a few hundred metres east again, to the to the wonderfully convenient Westboro Station. If they were headed westbound, they could then cross the transitway again. A veritable model of how to enforce active transportation, provided of course, that the resident didn’t simply decide to take their car parked so conveniently right at their front door.

Our cities do provide some benches. They are often found in designated parks. In Ottawa, the NCC provides lots of benches in its riparian green spaces. But other than benches for “recreational” areas, they are hard to find. Some rejuvenated traditional main streets are now being furnished by the City, but most streets everywhere are naked of furniture or other pedestrian amenities. Bus shelters sometimes have benches, for those who like to be manikins in glass boxes until their bus arrives. I guess maybe the planners all feel people bring their own seats with them in the form of their automobiles. Or they should pay for their seats by buying something in a café that has a carefully fenced off patio. Or maybe it is a residual fear of encouraging the wrong sort of people to hang around, bothering the worthy taxpayers. Teens! Men with pony tails! Tonsil inspectors! Whatever the reason, benches are conspicuously absent. Because the city comes with a heavy bureaucracy, it is difficult for them to install a bench anywhere. The city pegs the cost of supplying and installing a bench along a sidewalk at about $5000 minimum, up to $10,000. Those rates include extensive overhead costs for engineering, site design, property survey, the actual vandal-resistant furniture itself, etc, etc. And this is after the citizen or business has expended huge amounts of time in correspondence to get the bench even on someone’s agenda. Why fight city hall?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550" caption="Curb appeal: the secret to better public landscaping?"][/caption] A lot of civic money is spent installing and maintaining landscaping along some major city roads. This is particularly noticeable in post-1960 areas where arterials usually have significant side boulevards that are grassed or sometimes even treed. The landscaping is designed to be appreciated at 70 kph rather than humans travelling on foot or on bicycle. Even in modern suburbs with planned collector streets, the super-wide side boulevards look like so much unappealing, wasted  space (see for example, Spratt Drive in Riverside South, but identical examples are found in all new suburban areas). In recent years, our Cities have shown more enthusiasm for greening inner-city streets. Sometimes this takes the form of planting beds adjacent to the sidewalk. These beds get trampled on and abused since sidewalks are usually way too narrow to meet actual walkability requirements.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="596" caption="By contrast: Denver's airport not shy about posting the good news"][/caption] In the last few weeks, I’ve had reason to head out to Ottawa’s MacDonald-Cartier Airport, not once, not twice, but three times. And back. Being a cheap SOB, I wondered if I could get there by bike, and thus save the O-Train/Route 97 fare. And since there were two of us, we might save two fares. And since we couldn’t return on the transfer, we might save four fares. Biking was becoming more and more attractive! It seemed to me to be a long way away from my Preston Street abode. I could only picture in my mind the Bronson-Airport Parkway route, and that sure didn’t appeal to me as a fun cycle. So, I referred to my now-essential copy of the Cycling Map of Ottawa-Gatineau, which is sold at exactly the right price (it’s free) and shows all the bike routes, paths, lanes, and “suggested routes”, regardless of which government owns the facility. The only other recommended route towards the airport was on the west side of the Rideau River, using Prince of Wales/Prescott Highway. Now that is a road I do know, and it also didn’t appeal to me. Then I figured I could parallel it by going south on Preston to the Arboretum Pathway, to Hartwell Lock (surely the most unfun bit of the route, and it’s deservedly in Alex deVries’ Top Ten of worst bike problems), to Hogs Back, and then out the Prince of Wales Highway. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Hartwell Lock offers good exercise in lifting and carrying your bike."][/caption]

[flickrslideshow acct_name="spacing" id="72157626981966048"] As an urban society, we have to shift our focus away from exclusively serving motor vehicles as the norm, and towards serving people, regardless of the mode they use. Say you want to give directions to visit you. Giving driving instructions is quite straight forward. Take Albert Street to Bronson then turn right… etc etc.  Roads have names because people can remember them, sort them, and keep things somewhat straight. Now try giving  instructions to your house using pedestrian and cycling paths: “Well, just past the bridge over the railway tracks, take the unpaved path on the right, the one under the hydro pylons, and follow it till you get to the fifth path that runs off to the left and follow it to get to my street. And don’t take the fourth or sixth turn-off, or you will never get here.” After all, we would never think of building streets without naming them, but we build paths without names. This lack of names denies them legitimacy. We name everything in our language; pundits and academics delight in putting a new name on some new trend or discovery. So why aren’t people demanding names for our paths? Especially with 9-1-1 service being geographically address based, knowing a location is a matter of vital urban safety as well as a convenience.

[caption id="attachment_4081" align="alignnone" width="596" caption="Just a dab of orange paint, but it means a City crew is on the ground"][/caption] The City is an amazing bureaucratic machine. It spends most of its time and resources promising, planning, and budgeting. All of that mental heavy lifting seems to leave it quite exhausted, but, sometimes, just sometimes, it surprises by making something actually appear "on the ground". There is a multipurpose path (MUP) (aka a bike path) proposed to run along side the O-Train corridor. Parts of it, south of Young Street, have existed since 1963. This year, Council decided to fund an underpass under Somerset, which was the last big remaining impediment to the project. Now there are signs of progress on the ground. The painted lines on the Somerset sidewalk (above) show the centre line of the underpass. Imagine, someone is actually out on site! The City has to remove the pavement on the road, dig the hole/trench, drop in the precast box underpass, and fill it in.

The loss of amenity is noticeable when an attractive bit of the pedestrian realm or sidewalk is adversely affected by adjacent developments. The contrast is less sharp when a mediocre space is made worse. Yet the result is the same: the pedestrian zone is impinged and impoverished. I always find the C D Howe building in downtown Ottawa to be an underachiever. The building is somehow less than the sum of its parts. Inside there's a waterfall, winter garden, soaring three storey spaces, pedestrian bridges, jetson elevators, retail spaces, food court .... And outside offers an extra-wide sidewalk with some weather protection, plus "garden" space at the the east and west ends. Yet the building still seems unsatisfactory. Is the covered sidewalk diminished by the brutal columns and raw concrete beams? Do the massive flights of stairs down to the lower concourse ever seem welcoming?

The City is conducting studies for the placement of a ped-cyclist bridge over the Rideau River connecting Somerset E to Donald Street. I think this will be a very useful link. I am also delighted that we are constructing a link based on its own merits and appeal to cyclists and peds and not just as an appendage catering to motorist origin-destination desires. From the newsletter of the study team, I espy the following comment, which is pretty ...