Interesting links and notes on updates to my main website.



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Copenhagenize in Ottawa June 3, 2011

Mikael "Copenhagenize" Colville-Andersen will speak about urban cycling at noon on June 3, 2011 in Ottawa.

...an entertaining look at Bicycle Culture 2.0.

Mikael is an urban mobility expert and "bicycle anthropologist" - with plenty of first-hand experience from Denmark.

He is on a tour of 18 countries talking about how to reclaim the bicycle for what it once was - a smart, respectable and liberating way for sensible people to get around - no special gear or bravado required. Cycling Vision is delighted to bring Mikael's engaging presentation to Ottawa.

When:
Friday, June 3, Noon

Where:
Cartier Place Hotel, 180 Cooper St (east of Elgin)

Cost:
Free. Munchies provided.

Parking:
Indoor bike parking is limited. Register at front desk.

from http://www.cycling-vision.ca/events/

You can also see Mr. Colville-Andersen cycling around Copenhagen with David Suzuki.

His blog is http://www.copenhagenize.com/ and he tweets @copenhagenize

Labels: cycling, ottawa, urban planning

posted by Richard at 08:12 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Jan Gehl presentation about urban planning in Ottawa - October 6, 2010

I am glad that NCC (finally) posted video of Gehl's talk online - it's great.

Here it is at giant NCC URL. You can also get the slides from his presentation (although you would never know this from navigating the cycling site).

Note: There's no way to make the video full-screen; I think the NCC should use a different player and put the content on YouTube or some other video site as well.

The NCC has also improved its Cycling in Canada’s Capital Region page with better links to the work it is doing, although they STILL don't link to the PDFs of cycling-presentations (including Gehl's) that they host on their own site.

Previously:

Wednesday, October 20, 2010 NCC cycling presentations - including PDF of Gehl's presentation

Saturday, October 09, 2010 Jan Gehl in Ottawa - my livetweets from the event

Labels: cycling, links to presentations, links to video, ncc, ottawa

posted by Richard at 07:55 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

NCC cycling presentations

You might think that the place to look for cycling presentations would be

http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/biking

but they're not there. Instead go to

http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/

and follow Plan->Transportation

NCC: giant ugly URL

to two slide decks:

What Makes a Bicycle-Friendly City? by Ms. Inge Molenaar, The Hague’s leading expert in cycling infrastructure. The presentation is called Cycling in The Netherlands and The Hague (PDF). From December 7, 2009

Cycling as Part of Urban Living: Public Presentation was the supposed topic of the presentation by Jan Gehl, but actually he gave a fantastic presentation about his new book, Cities for People (PDF).

I tweeted from this session, and I've asked the NCC now twice if they could post the video of Gehl online (I'm pretty sure they were recording it, I was sitting right next to the video cameras) - so far I've gotten no response.

UPDATE: These are some of the past and future cycling planning things from the NCC, Gatineau and Ottawa...

In addition to the many planned cycling projects undertaken each year by the cities and the NCC, the following initiatives will take place this fall:

• The members of the Capital Region’s delegation who attended the Velo-City Global 2010 Conference and visited cities in Europe where cycling is a dominant mode of transportation, will share what they learned, including best practices for integrating cycling facilities into urban environments. Public presentations will take place at Maison du Citoyen in Gatineau on September 21 at 7 pm and at Ottawa City Hall on September 22 at 7 pm.


• One of the world’s leading planning experts on sustainable mobility and cycling in an urban setting, Mr. Jan Gehl of Gehl Architects – Urban Quality Consultants, will speak on October 6, 2010 in a public session about his experience transforming major world cities into cycling friendly and sustainable communities.
  
• In addition, Gehl Architects – Urban Quality Consultants will conduct a workshop, lead by the NCC in collaboration with both cities, to better understand the opportunities and challenges related to integrating cycling as a sustainable mode of transportation in the downtown core of Ottawa and Gatineau.


• The group also agreed that an integrated regional cycling map will be developed incorporating on-road cycling lanes, shared-use recreational pathways and other cycling facilities such as Bike-Share stations throughout the Capital Region.

from NCC and Cities to Place Cycling at the Heart of Capital Region

Labels: cycling, links to presentations, ncc, ottawa

posted by Richard at 18:12 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

fact-finding trips & social media:

[NCC CEO Marie Lemay] made the comments as she prepared for her departure on a 10-day bicycle-themed fact-finding trip to Europe. Lemay, along with Gatineau Mayor Marc Bureau and Ottawa Councillor Jacques Legendre, will meet with city officials in The Hague, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Copenhagen to discuss ways of fostering cycling as a mode of urban transportation.

At the end of the tour, the delegation will spend four days at the Velo-Cité Global 2010 conference in Copenhagen, which will bring together urban planners, politicians and cycling experts from around the world. Topics of discussion range from bike-share programs to cold-weather cycling.

Ottawa Citizen - NCC boss talks cyclable city - June 19, 2010

Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien has said he's not very interested in cycling, and turned down the invitation by the NCC head to attend the Velo-City conference.

Ottawa Citizen - Could Ottawa get Copenhagenized? - June 20, 2010

So Lemay, Bureau & Legendre are going on an urban cycling fact-finding trip. First let me say, I am 100% in favour of this. Learning from other cities by visiting them is an excellent way to truly understand what is possible. And so when they come back bolstered by personal experiences, shared information and new connections, I think that is of huge benefit to the NCR.

But.

This is a major initiative. 10 days, concluding with Velo-city 2010 in Copenhagen, is a huge fact-gathering project. Velo-city is an event that has been building off and on for the past 30 years.

And we have a traditional system: we elect or appoint representatives, and they go off and worry about 100% of the issues as our representatives, while we go about our lives. There are reasons for this:
* in the past it was impractical for representatives to communicate rapidly with constituents
* constituents are busy and not experts
* we want representatives to be reflective and not reactive


But.

All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

This is 2010 and we have social media. Which means that you can share what you are observing. You can share it in real-time, or you can share at the end of the day, or the end of the week.

You can also still follow a traditional process which is some combination of:
* you take your own private notes and they inform your own private decisions
* you present about your findings but only to your colleagues
* you eventually produce a Great Big Report which is poorly announced and buried many levels deep (on your website and in the bureaucracy) so only political insiders ever find it and read it

So here's the thing: I think if you're going to send a bunch of representatives off to find facts, in 2010, it is encumbent upon them to engage the public in the process. That means reaching the public through traditional means, like the news reports cited above, and through consultations like ottawa.ca/bikelane (which has a ton of information, as PDFs, at the bottom of Open House 1), and through posting your Great Big Report.

But is there no responsibility to bring people along with you on your journey? Is engagement just about your personal learning followed by a Great Big Report? While it's true that many urban planning enthusiasts and cyclists will not be reached online, many are. If the information is online it can be shared, emailed, retweeted, blogged about, cited on Wikipedia... it can be used by citizens. This sharing can expand the scope of information beyond the hard core of people for whom this is a primary interest, to the broader public. Just look at the list of urban issues blogs and sites, just related to the Mid-Centretown consultation (from the Mid-Centretown planning blog):

* Apartment 613
* Blogawa
* Capital Neighbourhoods
* Designing Ottawa
* Greater Ottawa Blog
* Images of Centretown
* Modern Ottawa
* Ottawa Meme
* Ottawa SkyscraperPage Forum
* Somerset Street West Today
* Spacing Ottawa
* The Ottawa Project
* Urbsite
* Watawa Life
* West Side Action

Shouldn't those citizens also be served? And that's just urban planning enthusiasts. I'm sure the list of Ottawa urban cycling enthusiasts online is as long, if not much longer.

Engagement doesn't have to be hugely complicated. Twitter accounts + TwitPic. A hashtag. And/or a Flickr account. Individual blogs. And/or an aggregator. Or a group blog specific to the particular fact-finding mission.

I'm a citizen. I want to engage Lemay, Bureau & Legendre about this issue. I want to engage other representatives and citizens around this issue. Where do I go? There's no hashtag I can use. There's no aggregator I can feed into. There's no blog I can post to. I can contact each representative individually, through a private channel like email or a physical letter. Or I can post in my blog like this, but that's certainly not a central shared discussion space.

Plus which, citizens can inform the representatives in real-time, it's not just some one-way representative gathers information thing. Wouldn't it be great if the representatives were tweeting and informed citizens could make suggestions and provide additional information? Like "oh, you must go around the corner and see this amazing city cycling facility with showers and indoor parking" or "here is a report written by the person you just tweeted about" or "could you ask the person speaking a question about..."

We can, of course, disagree about this




But I think if you want to maximize the value of what is a significant investment, you will get the biggest impact by engaging citizens through all channels before, during and after the event.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, Lemay, Bureau & Legendre aren't on Twitter, don't have blogs, and there is no central information sharing & discussion space for their fact-finding trip. I think this is a substantial missed opportunity.

Labels: cycling, ottawa, urban planning

posted by Richard at 10:40 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Ottawahagen - where is our urban plan?

Ottawa council is well-aware of the issues covered in this great article about urban planning lessons from Copenhagen, but I have yet to see them take the necessary steps to transform the downtown.

On your bike: What the world can learn about cycling [and urban planning] from Copenhagen - The Independent - 18 October 2009

Labels: copenhagen, cycling, ottawa, urban planning

posted by Richard at 09:46 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)