By Kate Twiss
This Crystal Beach Lakeview (CBL) resident’s opinion is that Ottawa’s official slogan should be “You Can’t Get There From Here!”
Heck, you can’t even get there from there! Don’t get yourself stuck on King Edward trying to turn west into the market. If, by mistake, you do, just give up and enjoy the ride to Gatineau. You can always go to the Museum of History instead, like it was your plan all along.
Used to be you could get anywhere in Ottawa by car in 20 minutes. It was Ottawa’s best feature. Now, parking is expensive and difficult, driving is bad for the planet, and if you try to take transit from CBL to the Bytown theatre or the Ottawa Art Gallery for a foreign film, your hour-and-a-half movie is going to take you three hours of transit.
Perhaps the reason the Origin Destination survey (see the Transportation Trends Report (download a .zip version) on Engage Ottawa for the Transportation Master Plan) showed fewer trips from the Outer Urban transect (including CBL) to Downtown isn’t just because of the pandemic and fewer people in the office, maybe we haven’t been going because “you just can’t get there from here!”
Parallel detours
We tore down our prize-winning bus system to put in a train, just before Covid hit and everybody stopped going to work. (It really was a good idea at the time.) Building the train required construction and detours on all the parallel streets. We have construction and detours on the Kichi Zībī Mīkan, Richmond Road, Byron, Scott, Carling, and the Queensway. Actually, some of those closures have nothing to do with the LRT; they’re unrelated things that nobody coordinated. For a while, the so-called “freedom convoy” even shut down traffic on Wellington near the Parliament buildings and we detoured through Quebec to get to the market.
Everybody blames the pandemic for downtown decay and the death of the farmers’ market, but how much of it is due to people like CBL residents just not being able to get there from here?
Our poor new night mayor has his work cut out for him. And he’ll need to figure out who his customers are. Foreign tourists? Local downtown residents? So far, we’ve just been throwing ideas at the market. Close some streetsI A play structureI A police shop! I know, I know—more Adirondack chairs—Adirondack chairs have a lot to do with Ottawa’s brand! Just who are the customers for the market? It’s clear nobody’s been too concerned about CBL residents not being able to go downtown. I used to take my visitors to the Byward farmers’ market at Thanksgiving or Easter or to Parliament Hill to see the lights at Christmas. Not doing that now. Hard to imagine taking people to Winterlude now, even without climate change.
Cars are bad—we get it!
Okay, things change. Cars are bad. We get that. But surely to heavens, this could all have been done with less pain.
Yep, safe streets are great, cars are bad, walking and bikes are good. It’s just not fair, however, to try to force us into a transit system that doesn’t exist and may not exist for decades. Paris and London are lovely and walkable—we get that—but they have more than a century of subways underneath them.
Let’s hope
Let’s hope no more councillors try to be heroes by closing streets, not thinking about how people are going to visit the residents of their wards. Let’s hope there are no more detours on the Kichi Zībī Mīkan, Richmond Road, Carling, and Scott, no more off-ramps closed on the always busy Queensway, no more closed streets in front of the Parliament buildings, no more dead markets, no more patios and Adirondack chairs, at least until stage 2 of the LRT opens. (Now, I’m being selfish—that only helps people west of Tunney’s.) Let’s hope that, if Ottawa ever takes on another big transportation project, more thought is given to how people are going to get around during the years it takes to build it.
Closing a street is easy. Transit is hard. Closing a street doesn’t demonstrate leadership; building transit does.
Maybe I’ll be in better humour when the LRT gets out to Bayshore. When is that supposed to happen?
“Soon. Soon. It will be soon.”
Well, I guess I could put my effort where my mouth is, do the surveys, and engage on the Transportation Master Plan!
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