[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Landfill in Los Angeles: next stop for Ottawa waste technology?"][/caption] -------- CITY LIVING Gen Y trading suburban space for urban convenience (Ottawa Citizen) -------- ENVIRONMENT Moodie Drive Landfill --Plasco lands $110M cash infusion (Ottawa Citizen) -------- MUNICIPAL ELECTION Record number of candidates for Ottawa vote (CBC Ottawa ) Moment Doucet Campaign Caught Fire (Ottawa Citizen) 2010 election will be Ottawa's most accessible (EMC Ottawa ) -------- PEDESTRIAN SAFETY Pedestrians, cyclist reported on 416, 417(Ottawa Citizen) -------- PUBLIC ART New Barrhaven transit station will boast public art, on the sheep(Ottawa ...

I'm in Winnipeg this week attending the Fringe Festival; it's a captivating 10-day event that hosts over 150 theatrical productions from around the world, and it centres on the wonderfully-preserved and revitalized Exchange District and Old Market Square. I grew up here in the 60s and 70s, and in those days no one I knew ever went to the Exchange District; in fact back then the area didn't even go by any name at all and unless you were employed by one of the mid-century businesses that still valued the low rent and central location the district – fur storage, typewriter repair, offset printers, that sort of thing – you had no reason to show your face along the grimy streets just north of the famous corner of Portage and Main. Really, the district had been in slow decline since a short period of boom in the 'teens and twenties when the civic fathers imagined that their role in  the Western Canadian grain trade would soon turn the city into "The Chicago of the North".

In the midst of the ongoing debate about the future of Light Rail Transit it Ottawa it can be easy to forget that we've now had LRT rolling through our city for nine years thanks to the O-Train "pilot project" launched along an old CP rail corridor in 2001. That's getting a little long in the tooth for a test run, which seems to be why the City has announced a 5-week haitus in service this summer so that "lifecycle maintenance" can be carried out to carriages and track. The shut-down starts this Monday, the 12th, and the train will be replaced with a special service for the duration. As  a pilot project running along a largely out-of-sight length of track with limited integration with the rest of the transit system, the O-Train has been  derided as the "train to nowhere". Yet when Carleton U is in session -- and that is pretty much year around nowadays -- the ridership is up around 10,000 per day, twice what the estimates projected.

In a 15-9 vote last night Ottawa City Council approved the Lansdowne Live partnership. While Spacing Ottawa took no position on the redevelopment — our contributors and commenters were split on the issue — over the course of the debate and the public consultation process we ran strong arguments both in favour and opposed to the OSEG proposal, starting with an impassioned "pro" editorial on our very first day from Alain Miguelez, who called it a key city-building project and argued that: There should be more people at Lansdowne. There should be more ...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="An all-too-common Centretown streetscape"][/caption] They're ugly when full, desolate when empty, and they promote unsustainable commuter practices. Unfortunately, surface parking lots disfigure the streetscape all over Centretown, tearing large holes in the urban fabric and making the built form of Canada's capital city often resemble a small town in the middle of the prairies. So it's no surprise that the team charged with delivering a cohesive Community Design Plan for Mid-Centretown have parking lots firmly in their sights as they begin the planning process that will make the area between Kent and Elgin ready to receive its share of the 10,000 extra residents Centretown is expected to attract by 2031. The .pdf of the slides the planning team presented to a Community Open House held this week is available on the planning team's blog site or you can click here for a direct download. It's a fascinating document, and one of the most telling visuals in the slide deck is  the one reproduced below.

The always-excellent West Side Action is two parts into a 5-part series on Bronson Avenue. Bronson was designated as an arterial in the 1970s as part of the Centretown plan, and bears the brunt of north-south automobile traffic in a wide swath of  Centretown,  from Kent/Lyon in the east to Booth in the west. Factors like noise, dust, narrow sidewalks, and limited pedestrian crossings make Bronson a real barrier for foot and cycle traffic, separating Chinatown from points east and discouraging development along Bronson itself. Bronson is slated for reconstruction in 2011, and, astonishingly, the City presented a plan to the neighbourhood that would see engineers actually widen the roadbed, facilitating even greater traffic speed along the road.

Last Friday I had the opportunity to try out the commuter bus line offering return service to downtown Carleton Place that was launched earlier this month. As I wrote in the preview post: Unlike most commuter bus services in the Ottawa valley, Lanark Community Transit is offering a return service that will allow passengers to go "against the flow" and actually travel to an outlying town in the morning ...