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    Thursday, January 19, 2012
    Thoughts on Downtown Moves and Ottawa's urban future

    The January 18, 2012 Downtown Moves Open House was a low-key event with discussions around display panels and large printed maps of the study area.

    I have posted photos of all the display panels (except for two where people put dots on their home & work addresses and problem areas for walking and cycling).  There was also a large handout with additional information that I will photograph and post online.

    Here are the display panels: Downtown Moves - Open House Jan 18, 2012.  UPDATE: Now includes the five sections of the large handout from the event, at the end of the photo set.  ENDUPDATE

    I was fortunate to have the opportunity to have a long chat with the city's planning lead on the project, Nelson Edwards.  I spoke about the importance of having a lively streetlife, of having interest and activity in the lower three stories of buildings as they engage the street (Jan Gehl has said these lower levels are key, where people on the street can see what's going on above and vice-versa for people living above).  Mr. Edwards has a very comprehensive perspective, but I worry that the Downtown Moves initiative is challenged with being all things to all people.

    At its very core, it's about taking advantage of the buses being (partially) replaced by underground LRT, so that the study area (the Central Business District) can both adapt to the new pedestrian flows, as well as becoming a better urban environment as a whole.

    You can get a sense of the challenge from the many, many "Strategic Directions" the project has declared for the study area:
    • Light Rail Transit Focused
    • Animated and Captivating
    • Competitive and Catalyzing
    • Rebalanced and Equitable - "We will increase the amount and quality of space on downtown street right-of-ways that serve pedestrians, cyclists and transit users."
    • Connective and Continuous
    • Liveable
    • Efficient, Flexible and Affordable
    • Active and Healthy
    • Green, Sustainable and Enduring
    • Capital Public Space
    • Safe and Accessible
    That's a lot to ask from one study.

    I think the core thing to understand about the CBD is that it is not a failure.
    It was designed to be that paragon of Modernist planning: the single-use district.  They believed in strict separation of their three functions: dwelling, work, and recreation.  All to be tied together with their fourth function: transport.

    In practice what this resulted in was people living in detached single family homes out in the suburbs, with work clustered in "office parks" downtown and along highways, and recreational areas separated from both.

    They really thought that this idea of the city as a "machine" or "factory", where you would separate out each function and make it "more efficient" would lead to the best possible living, working, and playing environments.

    The modernists also thought that all functions of the city planning should be separate with parks planning separate from traffic engineering separate from etc. etc.

    Instead of this mechanistic, reductionist planning producing efficient paradises it created lifeless surburban zones where people stay inside their houses, connected to lifeless work zones where people stay inside their buildings, connected to recreational zones where people stay inside the stadium.  And by "connected" meaning only highway upon highway as single-occupant cars rush from one "function" to another.

    And the idea of buildings actually engaging with their environment, being in a specific place with people flowing in and out at ground level becomes so alien and lost that all your buildings turn inward, with dead exteriors surrounding interior food courts and shopping; buildings that could be dropped anywhere. 

    They were totally wrong.  Hey, it happens.

    But the result is most Ottawa families living a car commute away outside the greenbelt in cookie-cutter suburbs sprawling outwards, a CBD that cars and transit rush as quickly into and as quickly out of as possible at 9 and at 5, a hockey stadium out in the middle of nowhere, and endless expense on the car transportation (and to a much lesser extent transit) network needed to connect these far flung islands together.

    Even the arts centre in the core of the city turns its back to the sidewalk, because who would ever arrive anywhere by foot?  Instead it welcomes the car on the canal side, far away from the rabble of the street.

    Plus which Rideau Centre in typical inward facing "special zone" fashion sucks up all the destination retail.

    This would be hard enough if we had stopped doing it.
    But most housing still goes beyond the greenbelt.
    Most new buildings (e.g. 180 Kent) continue the same inward-facing food court mall placeless design that Place du Portage and L'esplanade Laurier exemplify.
    New condos are dropped in as vertical suburbs, single-use residential zones that could be anywhere, with no engagement with the street.
    And the entire thing is held together with a network of high-speed city core "arterial" roads that makes the entire downtown an offramp.

    To unwind this deliberate 1960s successful design, we need to stop 50 years of assumptions, engineering and design.  Many cities started doing this over two decades ago in the 80s and 90s.  We have barely started to attempt it now, in the second decade of the 21st century.


    It will be a long long walk home.

    We've got the bones (and culture) of a small town with a couple main streets.  We've got the housing of a small town that was packed with middle-class government employees.  (See Residence Distribution of Civil Servants, 1947 from the Gréber Plan.)  And we have the design of a wave of 1960s brutalism, "urban renewal", and Modernism, that left us with a city core stripped of inhabitants, a street rail system that was erased from the map, and the suburbs, malls and associated car infrastructure that swept across North American cities.

    I see this most often in the endless discussions around Sparks.
    Sparks had surface rail running down the middle, with destination shopping (the Apple Stores and Lululemons of their age) on either side.  It connected Lebreton Flats to Lowertown and to the destination shopping on Rideau Street.  It was surrounded by a dense grid of housing for civil servants, shop keepers and all the people who live in a typical central town.

    Then they took away the rail, all the destination shopping went to Rideau Centre, they flattened Lebreton, Lowertown crumbled into a low-income disaster area (like most city cores), all the rest of the people living downtown fled to the suburbs, and they dropped cold inward-facing office towers around Sparks.

    And people wonder why it doesn't work?
    It's a wide pedestrian street that connects nothing to nothing, with no shopping and no people who live nearby.  In a real world where people like to move along edges, and watch other people.  Is this seriously hard for people to understand?  It's a pedestrian street in the middle of what might as well be a suburban office park.  OF COURSE NO ONE WALKS THERE.

    Look at the reality

    It's a bunch of offices (pink colour)
    DSC07517



    fed by a network of high-speed arterials (red lines)
    DSC07529

    Dedicated zones like this, with public space (that is to say, the streets) dedicated only to ensuring people can drive in and out AS FAST AS POSSIBLE are Dead by Design.

    You might as well stand at a strip mall by the Queensway and wonder why it isn't like being in downtown Paris.

    It will take decades of effort to unwind this.  For example, the single biggest thing you can do to make this a place for the people who actually live there is to slow down traffic.  It is insane to have high-speed traffic in a downtown core, a centre-ville.  Over 30km/h, cars vs. pedestrians and cars vs. cyclists ends with dead citizens.

    That means you have to signal to people, through road design (not through signage or laws, which people ignore), through the design of the streetscape itself, that they not on the safe wide highway, that they have to slow down and pay attention, that they are now not the lords of carland, they are visitors to a pedestrian zone.

    Just that alone, trying to narrow and slow streets, returning them to their pre-1950s widths with attractive street features and enough uncertainty so that drivers go slowly with care, will be a huge, incredible fight.  How do I know this?  Because King Edward already tried to do this, and Bronson is trying to do it now, and the traffic engineers return instead with ever-wider, ever-faster, ever-more-highwaylike designs.  This is not surprising, they are TRAFFIC ENGINEERS.  Their purpose is to make the cars go faster and the traffic flow smoothly.  Expecting them to produce traffic-slowing pedestrian designs is like expecting a pastry chef to design an aircraft carrier.

    If the city believes "Rebalanced and Equitable" streets, that means rebalanced and equitable planning.  That means for every traffic planner, there should be a pedestrian planner, a cycling planner, and a transit planner.  That's how you actually get to "rebalanced".

    This is not about hating cars or towers.  This is about building a city, not a giant strip mall.  Urban design is different from suburban design.  The role of the car downtown is different.  The way residential towers need to engage with the street is different.  For that matter, the way people need to think about their city and move around it is different.  There is a big risk that, as with the dead street life around the apartment towers full of thousands of people on Laurier west of Kent, if we drop more towers on Nepean and Gladstone near Elgin without using design and education to convey to people that they are in a city where they can walk around, shop, and live outside in the city, we'll just end up with a downtown that has "foot commuters" who pour out of residential towers, up into officer towers, and back again, without ever stopping to experience the city they're actually in.

    If you think this is theoretical, there are thousands of units in condo towers already approved, with many of the towers under construction right now.
    DSC07519

    The only way I can see to chip away at this realistically is:
    1) The city must hire more dedicated pedestrian, cycling and transit planners (it has already taken great stride in hiring cycling planning, but has zero pedestrian planners).
    2) The city must convey the idea, both through explicit statements and implicit design, decade by decade, that cars are visitors to the downtown, not the owners of downtown, and that they are welcome only to the extent that they respectfully share public transportation space with other users
    3) The city must have zoning it can ENFORCE, design it can ENFORCE, and plans that are actually followed, in a way that is comprehensible to ordinary humans (as opposed to the current situation where developers build whatever they want wherever they want to the lowest possible standard, and use layer upon layer of city, NCC and other planning documents to win their case every time at OMB)

    There is so much more than even these basic steps.  This is basically the project of the redevelopment of the entire urban design for the city.  I am skeptical about what can be accomplished.  I hope at least that it can move on three fronts, with small "popup" demonstration projects, enforced standards for new buildings, and a long term plan to make the city environment better as buildings are replaced and streets are upgraded.

    You can reach Nelson at

    Nelson Edwards
    Planning and Growth Management Department
    Infrastructure Services and Community Sustainability
    City of Ottawa
    110 Laurier Street West
    Ottawa, ON
    K1J 1P1
    Tel:
    613-580-2424 ext. 21290
    Fax:
    613-580-2459
    e-mail:
    downtownmoves@ottawa.ca

    You can sign up for the Downtown Moves mailing list.

    The city's website section for the project itself is ottawa.ca/downtownmoves

    This is a huge change in city direction.  It needs every citizen pushing their councillors, city staff, and engaging in the planning process to help it happen.

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    Sunday, January 15, 2012
    Downtown Moves meeting January 18, 2012

    Downtown Moves, which is the new name for the Downtown Ottawa Mobility Overlay, is having its second meeting

    Wednesday, January 18, 2012
    5:30 to 8:30 pm
    Ottawa City Hall, Jean Piggott Place, Main Floor
    110 Laurier Avenue West
    This is the second in a series of public events that will provide residents with an understanding of the study, what it hopes to achieve and how it will transform Ottawa’s streets over the next 20 years.
    The short URL is ottawa.ca/downtownmoves

    I'm using the Twitter hashtag #dottmo for the initiative.

    The previous events were more like stage-setting presentations, they didn't really delve into the project itself and its goals.

    What I would like it to be is: transforming the Central Business District (CBD) from a Monday-Friday 9am & 5pm commuter suburb in the core of downtown to a pedestrian-friendly 24/7 core with streetlife, connected to the Market, Centretown (south of the CBD) and Lebreton Flats.

    What I expect it will actually be is: How can we move commuters coming to/from the LRT stations out of the way of cars and in/out of their work towers as quickly as possible, while making some minor concessions to the fact that there are no longer buses on Albert & Slater.

    This is particularly important as Claridge and others have built a lot of condos in the area recently and are continuing.  Just in the next few years another 2000 or more condo units will come online, mostly dropped into the CBD in giant towers.

    In theory, Downtown Moves should take into consideration the Centretown Design Plan, most specifically the recommendations that the downtown core arterials (particularly Lyon, Kent, O'Connor and Metcalfe) be made two-way.  However the study scope is so narrow (just the CBD, just related to post-LRT) that I fear the Design Plan ideas will be lost.

    The short URL for the CDP is ottawa.ca/midcentretown

    but most of the information is in their blog in particular their final post: The FINAL Centretown Community Design Plan Has Arrived!  (I hope the blog is archived, as the site and URLs will surely expire at some point.)

    There are many other relevant documents including the Pedestrian Plan and the Cycling Plan.

    I thought Greenberg's presentation from the previous meeting was going to be posted online, but I can't find it.  I captured an archive of the November events and livetweeted Greenberg: Downtown Moves - Nov 1-3 Twitter archive.  His book Walking Home is excellent.  Highly recommended.  Covers how the suburbs ate the cities, and how we can walk our way back to lively, people-friendly urban design.

    Ottawa has had no shortage of outside experts providing us excellent advice on modern urbanism.  Where it falls apart is in two places: 1) Implementation using our actual city staff in our actual city 2) Funding and defending our decisions (e.g. enforceable zoning rather than development-via-OMB).

    More on this later.

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    Sunday, November 20, 2011
    Paris neighbourhoods

    The situation is confusing because there are both numbers with matching names (the 20 arrondissements) as well as names for different areas (districts / quartiers) which don't map directly to one arrondissement.

    Sometimes when you're searching e.g. for hotels they will list only by arrondissement name, other times only by number, other times by area names.  They're numbered in a spiral outwards - one through eight are kind of the inner core, after that they are progressively farther out.

    Here are the numbers and names

    1 - Louvre
    2 - Bourse
    3 - Temple
    4 - Hôtel-de-Ville
    5 - Panthéon
    6 - Luxembourg
    7 - Palais-Bourbon
    8 - Élysée
    9 - Opéra
    10 - Entrepôt, previously called Enclos Saint-Laurent
    11 - Popincourt
    12 - Reuilly
    13 - Gobelins
    14 - Observatoire
    15 - Vaugirard
    16 - Passy
    17 - Batignolles-Monceau
    18 - Butte-Montmartre
    19 - Buttes-Chaumont   
    20 - Ménilmontant

    This is a very good quick guide, with maps: aviewoncities.com - Arrondissements of Paris

    Here are some districts:

    Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis (mostly in the 4th although the end of Île de la Cité is in the 1st)

    Châtelet-Les-Halles - can refer to a major transit station, the area around it, or a broader area in the 1er and 2e around where the old market (Les Halles) used to be

    Faubourg Saint-Honoré - street (and to some extent surrounding area) with famous shopping in the 8e

    Bastille / Place de la Bastille - touches the corners of the 4e, 11e and 12e

    Montmartre - in the 18e on and around the Butte-Montmartre

    Le Marais - covers some parts of the 3e and the 4e

    Saint-Germain-des-Prés / Faubourg Saint-Germain - in the 6th around the church of the former Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (see map and info Quartier Saint-Germain-des-Prés)

    Odéon - in the 6th centred around the théâtre de l'Odéon (see map Quartier de l'Odéon)

    Invalides & École Militaire - in the 7e around these landmarks

    Montparnasse - in the 14e around the cemetary cemetery and tower, although may extend into the 6e and the 15e as part of the Boulevard du Montparnasse

    Oberkampf (in the 11th)

    Trocadero (in the 16e)

    Latin Quarter - parts of 5e and 6e around the universities - see Quartier latin

    Canal Saint-Martin (in the 10th and 11th along the canal)

    Wikipedia - Paris Districts is a useful although incomplete guide.   parislogue.com - Paris Neighborhoods is also useful.

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    Friday, November 04, 2011
    Downtown Moves - Nov 1-3 Twitter archive

    Below is the raw extract of tweets hashtagged #dottmo

    Context: Ottawa.ca - Downtown Moves (Downtown Ottawa Mobility Overlay Study)

    Most of them are from the Ken Greenberg talk, I have separated out earlier ones at the top.
    These are in oldest first order.
    (In case you're wondering how I did this, I took the Excel version of the Twitter archive I made, and sorted by ascending TweetID. then copied the text.)
    Where the tweets are in order, just from me and the date is the same, I have removed my Twitter handle (@rakerman) and the time stamp.

    Tweets from before Ken Greenberg's talk

    @rakerman
    2011-11-01T11:15:54-04:00
    questions: how Centretown Design #ccdp2011 Mobility relates to Downtown Moves #dottmo & Sidewalk Summit #ssdh http://t.co/OE8p55rY #ottcity

    I'm proposing #dottmo for Downtown Moves (hashtag = Downtown OTTawa MObility/MOves/Mobility Overlay) #ottcity

    @rakerman
    2011-11-02T20:29:26-04:00
    @OTWPolitics I suggested hashtag #dottmo

    @rakerman
    2011-11-03T06:02:53-04:00
    I will be using hashtag #dottmo for Downtown Moves / Mobility Overlay #ottcity

    #dottmo MT @OTWPolitics: For those who can't make it to City Hall tonight, Ken Greenberg's talking urban rejuvenation on @CBCOttawa

    @Centretowner
    2011-11-03T08:19:33-04:00
    RT @rakerman: I will be using hashtag #dottmo for Downtown Moves / Mobility Overlay #ottcity

    @Centretowner
    2011-11-03T09:10:47-04:00
    Anyone else tweeting from Downtown Moves talk by Andrew Wiley-Schwartz? #Ottcity #dottmo #ottbike

    @Centretowner
    2011-11-03T09:12:44-04:00
    Coun. @marianne4kanata talking about making our roads safer, and @JimWatsonOttawa signing Int'l walking charter #dottmo

    @JimWatsonOttawa
    2011-11-03T09:24:34-04:00
    RT @Centretowner: Coun. @marianne4kanata talking about making our roads safer, and @JimWatsonOttawa signing Int'l walking charter #dottmo

    @lana_stewart
    2011-11-03T09:35:37-04:00
    @Centretowner @rakerman They talk the talk... but will they walk the walk?? #ottcity #dottmo

    @Centretowner
    2011-11-03T09:39:06-04:00
    AWS's #dottmo talk about what NYC did at Times Square reminds me of what #Ottcity did in the '60s with Sparks St

    Ken Greenberg spoke November 3, 2011 at 7pm at City Hall.
    Context: Ottawa.ca - Downtown Moves - Public Lecture Program

    Ken Greenberg's talk

    @rakerman
    2011-11-03T19:01:15-04:00
    #dottmo just opening - Ken Greenberg talking about book

    #dottmo "we were swept up in a euphoria around the potential of the automobile"

    #dottmo 1939 World's Fair - GM exhibit - "it seemed like a good idea at the time"

    #dottmo "the hubris of that era... The automobile was at the heart of it"

    #dottmo Disney Magic Highway USA 1958

    #dottmo the summary of the Disney film is people were out of their minds (about cars) in the 1950s

    #dottmo from walkable cities to car-oriented cities

    #dottmo Jane Jacobs vs Robert Moses

    #dottmo as walkability becomes the most desired, poor are pushed out of city centers into suburbs

    #dottmo (car-centic design) producing a pattern of living that is not sustainable

    #dottmo massive financial drag on economy related to congestion, long car travel times

    #dottmo website: dead malls (symptom of car-oriented design failing)

    #dottmo "the best way to solve mobility is through land use"

    #dottmo need mixed use buildings

    #dottmo Bank Street Ottawa transformation

    #dottmo how to handle new immigrants - they are now ending up in suburbs - disconnected, difficult to get around

    #dottmo (me: in part this is about the Arrival City idea)

    #dottmo showing transformation of NYC Times Square

    #dottmo Madrid has buried city-centre highways

    #dottmo new ways to get around - bike share, car share, phone as access/payment for all forms of transportation

    #dottmo showing a Complete Streets design

    #dottmo if kids can bike to school, that's a good indicator

    #dottmo urban design to percentage of pedestrians using the space - temporary or permanent pedestrianization of roadways

    #dottmo Hammarby Sjostad  http://t.co/vRFX82t5

    #dottmo the next big challenge: retrofitting suburbia

    #dottmo #ottcity is there a link for the Bank Street redesign Ken is talking about?

    #dottmo restructuring around subway stops coming to York U

    #dottmo Mississauga "looks like a city... But on the ground it's auto-oriented"

    #dottmo "at the heart of a sustainable future is gracefully making this transition" to a pedestrian/cyclist/transit city

    #dottmo civil society needs to support these changes

    #dottmo iterate solutions with teams of experts to solve complex urban design problems

    #dottmo big turnout, mailing list I can sign up for, but not at all clear how people can participate, not just receive broadcasts #ottcity

    #dottmo I guess Ken Greenberg was talking about: Bank Street Community Design Plan http://t.co/u38bi6xL 1st I've heard of it. #ottcity

    #dottmo Here's the Disney Magic Highway video that Ken showed, demonstrating how crazy people were over cars in 1958 http://t.co/ZMSDVvWj

    Further Reading

    I think this is what the Mayor signed: The International Charter for Walking

    RandomHouse.ca - Ken Greenberg - Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder

    LibraryThing - Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder  

    Wired 15.12 - The Original Futurama [GM 1939 World's Fair exhibit]

    Wikipedia - Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities

    RandomHouse.com - Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City

    LibraryThing - Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City

    Arrival City: The Final Migration and the Next World

    US National Complete Streets Coalition

    Complete Streets Canada

    I would point you to a fantastic video of Jan Gehl talking in Ottawa about urban design, but the NCC reorganised their site and it has now disappeared.  You can see his slidedeck but it's almost useless without his (very funny) narration.  You can also follow the thread of blog postings back from Jan Gehl presentation about urban planning in Ottawa - October 6, 2010 but many of the links are now broken.

    Contact

    There is a general contact address: downtownmoves@ottawa.ca
    and the specific project manager is Nelson Edwards: nelson.edwards@ottawa.ca

    There was a mailing list you could sign up for at the event; you can probably get on it by emailing them.

    Nelson said on the afternoon of the 3rd there was a 40-person discussion / working group, but I don't know who the members were or how the results will be presented.

    Also Greenberg's presentation was recorded in some form - I think video - there was mention of a "podcast" of it being posted.

    Previously:
    November 1, 2011  questions about downtown mobility [now with answers]

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    Wednesday, November 02, 2011
    Ottawa - Centretown walkability

    As you walk around town between now and November 8th, consider the following topics and if possible please bring a list of 5 examples in each category.

    1.     General problems that apply city-wide (e.g. not enough money spent on building, or maintaining pedestrian linkages and routes)

    2.     Location-specific chronic problems in any part of the city (e.g. the light at the end of my street takes a long time to change after I press the crosswalk button)

    3.     Degradations—where conditions have recently gotten worse (e.g. new vehicular-priority advance turn signals, barricades to convenient street crossings, or the pathway gate at Preston and Albert that was recently locked) 
    Here are a couple:
    * The Bank Street advertising monoliths that block half of the sidewalk
    * The traffic signal control nodes (big boxes, usually sitting on a metal column) that block half of the sidewalk

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    Tuesday, November 01, 2011
    cat missing near Dundonald Park



    Shreddy.  Above is from a few months ago; she looks a bit older now.  She doesn't have a collar on at the moment but she is chipped.
    As you can see, grey with white stripes and white paws.
    Missing since Tuesday November 1, 2011 near Dundonald Park in Centretown (Ottawa).  Much missed.

    UPDATE 2011-11-02: Found late in the evening, she was stuck on the wrong side of (very busy arterial) Lyon.

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    questions about downtown mobility

    This is what I asked on the Centretown Design Plan blog:
    Will you be representing the Centretown Design Plan at the Downtown Moves (Mobility Overlay) events? http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_consult/mobility_overlay/program_en.html

    At Diane Holmes' Sidewalk Summit?  http://dianeholmes.ca/detail.php?news_id=333

    Is there a newer version of the Mobility Position Paper?  http://midcentretown.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/mid-centretown-mobility-paper-draft.pdf 

    What specific information has been/will be passed to the Downtown Moves (Mobility Overlay) study?  Is there more relevant material than the Mobility Position Paper (e.g. a chapter of the design plan)?

    What is the impact of the fact that the Study Area for Downtown Moves http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/public_consult/mobility_overlay/study_area_en.html only covers the CBD, and not all of Centretown?

    Where is the mechanism to move ideas like fixing the arterials (by making them 2 way, and eventually by reducing the number of lanes or adding bike lanes)?
    UPDATE 2011-11-03: I got a response (Ross at the Mid-Centretown Tomorrow blog has always been great with fast, detailed responses).

    Hi Richard – No, Urban Strategies is not involved in the Mobility Overlay, although Delcan (who were our transportation consultants) are the folks who are actually leading the Mobility Overlay Study. Teh good news there is that they will be able to transfer all their work over from the CDP to the DOMO study, so they will be well versed in local Centretown issues. Related to that, there is an updated Mobility Position paper that will be published with the final CDP – some further work on parking, TDM, two way conversions and the implications of removing metcalfe street from the Museum of Nature lawns.
    With regard to your questions around the Mobility Overlay, your best bet for answers and understanding how transportation networks might be improved and/or impact on adjacent communities is to contact Nelson Edwards at the City of Ottawa (nelson.edwards@ottawa.ca). Nelson is the project manager and will have the most recent information on the scope and methods of the study. It was our understanding that DOMO was to look at the two way conversions as part of its scope. I hope that this is still the case. As you know, Centretown has been included as the Area of Influence….but I am not really sure what this means with regard to work being undertaken locally.
    All the best
    Ross

    Previously:
    October 31, 2011  Downtown Moves - Public Lecture Program - Nov 2 & 3, 2011
    October 31, 2011  Ottawa Sidewalk (pedestrian) Summit Nov 8, 2011

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    meta: invoking ancient magic

    Updated my very very old Blogger template to show post titles on individual post pages.

    On the miniscule chance you should need to do this, it's a combination of itempage, blogger, and the page title:

    [title][$BlogTitle$][itempage]: [Blogger][$BlogItemTitle$][/Blogger][/itempage][/title]

    (I've changed angled brackets to square, as the Blogger editor is now too clueless to let me easily quote HTML code.)

    Labels:


    Monday, October 31, 2011
    Downtown Moves - Public Lecture Program - Nov 2 & 3, 2011

    See below for info on Public Lectures.

    Context

    Ottawa is doing a study on mobility downtown.
    Well, that's what I thought they were doing, actually as framed by the study area and terms, it's "what can we tweak in the Central Business District when LRT replaces the Albert & Slater bus transitway" and not "how can we improve pedestrian and cyclist mobility in all of Centretown".
    The primary Study Area is the Central Business District of the Central Area (north of Gloucester Street, between Bronson and the Rideau Canal), and along the major arterial streets that will be influenced by the significant changes as a result of the new LRT stations.
    from  Downtown Moves: Study Area and Study Context

    (This study was previously called the Downtown Mobility Overlay, but appears to have been rebranded as Downtown Moves: Transforming Ottawa’s Streets.)

    The Centretown Design Plan people had assured us that mobility-related recommendations, like restoring major arterials as two-way streets, would be incorporated into the Downtown Mobility Overlay, but I don't see how this will work in practice as the Study Area is just the CBD and is mostly about adapting to the LRT.

    Public Lecture Series

    November 2, 2011 - 7pm - Gil Penalosa
    register using web form, deadline OCTOBER 31, 2011

    November 3, 2011 - 9am - Andrew Wiley-Schwartz, New York City, Department of Transportation
    register by emailing downtownmoves@ottawa.ca , deadline OCTOBER 31, 2011

    November 3, 2011 -7pm - Ken Greenberg
    register using web form, deadline OCTOBER 31, 2011

    from Downtown Moves > Public Lecture Program

    UPDATE 2011-11-01: The Media Advisory for the public lecture program is out, unfortunately a day after the registration deadline.  It says
    The summit brings together national and international experts, community leaders, municipal staff and stakeholder agencies to listen and share their experiences as the City seeks to identify ways to create vibrant, safe and accessible streets for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders in downtown Ottawa.
    ENDUPDATE

    See also: Ottawa Sidewalk (pedestrian) Summit Nov 8, 2011

    Previously:
    May 30, 2011  Centretown planning links  

    Ottawa Sidewalk (pedestrian) Summit Nov 8, 2011

    Diane Holmes' "SIDEWALK SUMMIT"
    Tuesday, November 8, 2011, 7-9 pm
    Ottawa City Hall, Colonel By Room (second floor near Lisgar St. entrance)
    110 Laurier Avenue West


    Dear fellow pedestrians,
    The City of Ottawa spends tens of millions of dollars a year on road building, but very little on dedicated pedestrian-specific projects. As announced earlier, I am hosting a meeting on pedestrian safety that will bring together pedestrian advocates, community representatives and residents who want to improve our city's walking environment.

    At the meeting we will discuss the disconnect between what is promised in official planning documents (such as the Ottawa Pedestrian Plan) and what is spent in City budgets. We will also break out into groups to share our experiences and concerns about walking in Ottawa, to develop a priority list of pedestrian problems that need to be solved, and plan ways to make that happen.

    As you walk around town between now and November 8th, consider the following topics and if possible please bring a list of 5 examples in each category.

    1.     General problems that apply city-wide (e.g. not enough money spent on building, or maintaining pedestrian linkages and routes)

    2.     Location-specific chronic problems in any part of the city (e.g. the light at the end of my street takes a long time to change after I press the crosswalk button)

    3.     Degradations—where conditions have recently gotten worse (e.g. new vehicular-priority advance turn signals, barricades to convenient street crossings, or the pathway gate at Preston and Albert that was recently locked)

    Please pass along this invitation to anyone you think would be interested in improving conditions for pedestrians.

    Sincerely,

    Diane Holmes
    Councillor, Somerset Ward
    from dianeholmes.ca

    You may also want to consider trying to connect this up with the overlapping but apparently disconnected work being done by the Centretown Design Plan, the Downtown Mobility Overlay (apparently now called Downtown Moves: Transforming Ottawa's Streets), Choosing Our Future and NCC Horizon 2067.

    See also: Downtown Moves - Public Lecture Program - Nov 2 & 3, 2011

    UPDATE 2011-11-01: Also of note is the Ottawa Pedestrian Plan, marked draft 2009.  ENDUPDATE

    Previously:
    May 30, 2011  Centretown planning links

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