Editor's note: Many commentators have noted that the decision by Mayor O'Brien to run again in this fall's municipal elections means that he can campaign by claiming two significant achievements: spearheading the decision to build an East-West LRT that includes a downtown tunnel, and backing the proposal to redevelop Lansdowne Park. So far, the two major projects have been presented as "stand alone"; here Spacing Ottawa contributor Dwight Williams suggests a way to link them. In the months since the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG) brought forth their proposal for redeveloping Lansdowne Park, ...

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 ...

This Friday Spacing Ottawa will be traveling to the banks of the Mississippi River in Carleton Place to test out a new commuter bus line that was launched earlier this week. 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 and return later in the afternoon. Other commuter lines typically disgorge their passenger load in downtown Ottawa in the a.m. and park the bus until the afternoon ...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Prowling the depths: best left to auto traffic?"][/caption] Chris Bradshaw is the co-founder of Vrtu-car, and was co-owner until 2006. He is also a co-founder and long-time (1988-2000) executive member of Ottawalk. He is now a member of the Ottawa Seniors Transportation Committee. Chris and his wife live car-lite in Sandy Hill. Originally submitted as a comment, the following is Chris's response to an earlier Spacing Ottawa post ("The History of the Ottawa subway") wherein author Alain Miguelez outlined his reasons for supporting the City's plans to build a transit tunnel underneath downtown Ottawa. - The history related by Alain Miguelez shows that the wonderful 'moment' we have today is partly thanks to the procrastination of previous generations of planners and politicians; otherwise, we would be stuck with yesterday's technology and problematique. It is sobering to consider whether the plan now waiting for funding and environmental assessment will suffer the same fate. I expect so. I start with the premise that people belong at the surface of cities. Let vehicles with their power and speed use the subterranean spaces. For instance, downtown auto users are either passing through or destined for an underground parking garage. Why don't they go underground, instead of people? And the proposal's enormous number of very long escalators should simply be strung out horizontally for moving sidewalks to connect two super stations at either end of downtown, like Denver does (linked for decades by free electric buses on the surface).

Editor's note: an earlier version of this post appeared in Spacing Ottawa contributor Dave McClelland's Ottawa Project blog Ottawa’s Union Station: it’s a majestic building, a half-scale replica of New York City’s old Penn Station, and painfully underused. Since 1966, when the National Capital Commission removed rail from downtown, the building has served as a government conference centre, rather than a hub for rail travelers. However, if mayor Larry O'Brien isn't just floating the idea for the fun it, it seems that trains might just return to Union Station, in the form of a downtown stop on the new light rail system—taking the place of the Rideau/Sussex station in the LRT proposal. As its stands right now, the interior of Union Station is unknown to most Ottawans. An occasional conference centre for First Minister's meetings and other high-level discussions, its grand hall and spacious passageways are usually roped off to the citizens who walk past it each day. But as the main hall of a transit station, commuters would have cause to use the public space on a daily basis.

A supportive ecology is crucial to any organism, and Spacing Ottawa is no different. But whereas in many cities in North America our recent splash landing in the middle of the local blogosphere could have seen us washed us up on some very barren shores indeed, in Ottawa we were blessed to find ourselves surrounded by a rich variety of like-minded blogs from across the city. The water is warm here; we pan to bob along with the current and share what we see along the way. For this first passage through Ottawa's blogging archipelago, we want to highlight three sites that get right down to street level, and revel in what they find. Charles Akben-Marchand is a Centretown resident, neighbourhood activist, and superb observer of change in downtown Ottawa. His "Images of Centretown" blog is focused on the way memory attaches itself to buildings and other elements of our streetscape, and he carefully documents those moments of transition when a street changes forever, one iteration of a particular address or streetcorner giving way to the next. Here's Charles himself on what he does: