Bike Lanes

The City of Ottawa is good at talking about bike lanes. It is less good at actually building bike lanes. Although everybody seems to agree that bike lanes are an important element of any forward-looking transportation strategy, the system of bike lanes in Ottawa is largely lacking. If not for the NCC pathways, it would be a full blown disaster.

Case in point, the bike lane that travels from the Glebe, up Percy and Albert Streets to....well towards downtown. This is a primary bicycle commuting route to downtown which relies mostly on secondary streets. There is a lovely separated lane heading north from Catherine Street to Gloucester perhaps. And then cyclists are on their own. The lane doesn't take them into downtown, or even to Wellington St. to connect to the NCC pathway. The city pretends that the lanes continue by putting up signs with pictures of bicycles, but in reality, to get anywhere worth going involves mixing in with traffic and even riding on sidewalks ("shared" bike lanes). It is a true embarassment.

Ottawa spends hundreds of millions of dollars on roads every year. If Montreal and Toronto can take major downtown streets and create dedicated bike lanes, surely Ottawa can finish the bike lane on Percy and Bay one of these years.

In 2004, Ottawa council approved the Downtown Ottawa Urban Design Strategy. That wide-ranging document contains a grand overall vision for the urban core of Ottawa that most citizens can agree with. The Strategy aims to make Ottawa a more walkable, vibrant place to live, begining with its physical design. It covers everything from opening up the Escarpment District on the west side of downtown to integrating the University of Ottawa with its Sandy Hill surroundings to the east. The result is an excellent overview of potential improvements to the core, including streetscaping, sensitive infill, and opening up the Rideau Canal to the downtown area. Details can be found at http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/planning/community_plans/completed/urban_design/index_en.html

Of course, as good as the overall vision may be, the devil is in the details. Whereas the strategy document takes an overall view of the city's development, individual projects face numerous constraints ranging from the budgetary constraint to the NIMBY action. As a result, the integrity of the overall strategy can suffer as a result of pressures which often have undue influence on the planning process.

My goal in writing this is to give some attention to urban design issues as they fit into the overall strategy for re-making Ottawa into a 21st century urban environment. I am hoping that it will contribute to the discussion in a positive way. It may fail, but at least I will have tried.