I do like the new mountain built over the National Gallery. It’s so very Disney: what you see is not what you get. This view is from Bayview Station. Throughout the Public Advisory Committee consultations on the new LRT station to be built there, I encouraged the designers to use the building to “frame” a view of the downtown so that transit users could have a WOW moment every day. Such framing wouldn’t cost (much) extra, it’s just a matter of designing it in. This didn’t generate much excitement during the PAC process, but at a recent meeting with … Continue reading A new “vancouver” skyline in Ottawa

I was cycling on Albert Street just west of Preston when I spied a young lady hunched over, bike laying on the grass. Accident? Mechanical trouble? It turned out to be rather more interesting. There was very young baby skunk, a bit larger than a chipmunk, stuck on the edge of the road, unable to climb the curb. When approached, it raised its tail. Hmm. It was squinting, so it didn’t like the daylight. Solution: a large-ish plastic bag in hand, I walked up to it and sort of rolled it into the bag. Female.   Walked over the taller … Continue reading Skunk at Bluesfest

Kirchzarten, Germany: When filling out the hotel registration form in Kirchzarten, there was a little tear-off portion at the bottom. It was a transit pass for the hotel guest(s). For bus, rail, and streetcars. For a whole region running from Basel Switzerland in the south and encompassing the whole Freiburg area. It was a simple piece of cardstock, no fancy codes or chips required:   We used it to take the local train into Freiburg, saving gas and parking and hassles. Going the opposite way, we took it to Lake Tittisee, a recreation area a long ways east. Passengers on … Continue reading U-Pass for tourists

Dateline Boston: awesome lightning storm in Boston Monday night supercharges the atmosphere. The Prudential Tower has the windows lit up in a message. Photo by C.Darwin. Continue reading Lighting plays at Stanley cup finals

Feuchtwangen, Germany:  the following few pictures take us through the process for returning cans and bottles in a little town in Germany. No lining up with street-savy bottle collectors, this return-o-mat is in the lobby of a large grocery store. The gent we are stalking here has an entire shopping cart of empty Red Bull containers. He puts each one, one at a time, into the machine slot, the cans align front to back with ridges on the platform. As he withdraws his hand, a light comes on, and the cans rotate on their axis  a full 360 degrees. The … Continue reading recycling cans without the Beer Store guys

Found space parks should be cheap, in that they don’t require a multi-million dollar lot of land. But the very nature of found space means there are utilities, pavements, and adjacent users that have to be accomodated, so the park structures might be expensive per square metre. In Toronto’s little Italy there is a small park, split on two sides of a side street, created out of the outer boulevards, a modest street narrowing, about three foregone parking spaces. And created with love and imagination. About 20 years ago Ottawa had imagination to use some found spaces. There is a … Continue reading A Found-space park in Toronto

There are two main doors out of the luggage/arrivals area at Ottawa airport. The centre doors take you out to the taxi stand, car rentals, and parking garage. The south doors take you out much closer to the OC Transpo #97 bus stop. So what does the sign above those doors say?   Yup, the airport folks direct you back to the centre doors, where you gotta run past the taxis and all that, only to walk all the way back, dragging your luggage along, to get to the bus stop shoved way out to the furthest south end of … Continue reading Finding OC Transpo at Ottawa Airport

Somerset Street carries the Chinatown designation between Bay and Preston Streets. Yet it is Bronson that is being reconstructed, and there occured much debate about what landscaping should be carried through the intersection. Eventually, the agreement was for the Chinatown landscape to be continuous, and the Bronson one to be interrupted. And since it is Bronson being reconstructed, it means the contractors have to install Chinatown-style lights and pavers at that intersection. Originally calling for red and white concrete striped crosswalks, budget and time constraints forced some revisions. So all-red crosswalks were poured last week:   These crosswalks may later … Continue reading Crossing the street, seeing red

  Westsiders can be trendy. A what is trendier than a Hummer limo and a wedding banquet catered by a street vendor?   And wait, is that The Motel I spy in the background? Westsiders truly have it all. Continue reading Getting Married, Westboro Style

Where the Sherbourne separated bike lane and a bus stop share the same curb space, the cycle track rises up a few inches to sidewalk height. Rumble strips and cobbles demark the zone, and bright yellow textures mark the bus loading area for pedestrians. Water running down the curb is directed into a covered channel, with a grill on top to collect surface water from the walkway. Green, yellow, white, black, all the Fisher Price colours were employed. The city did not feel it was necessary to post signs advising pedestrians to wait for the bus off the track, nor advise cyclists … Continue reading Sherbourne segregated bike lane, part ii

  The section of Bronson that had pedestrian walks completed last fall used the City’s traditional “roller coaster” sidewalk design, as shown above. The whole width of walk “dips” for every car crossing. Motorists gets a smooth entry to their driveway; pedestrians get a thrill ride on undulating concrete. And in winter, walk plowing is hampered by the grade changes; the surface becomes only intermittently cleared bare.   Above: The City discourages businesses along Bronson because it so hazardous for motorists to stop. In front of this business, the whole front yard is paved so motorists can cut across the … Continue reading Rescue Bronson (part iii) : roller coaster sidewalks

A number of speakers at the recent City Hall open house on the Western section of the new LRT line (WLRT) favoured the Carling route. That route has a number of advantages, including distance from many of speakers favouring it over the Richmond Road options, a belief that there is more intensification potential there, and a firm belief that the WLRT should take priority over any other future LRT routes, so if the Carling-OTrain route knocks out the attractiveness of future southward or northward LRT routes that would have otherwise used the OTrain cut, well, too bad for them. A … Continue reading How much more intensification would make Carling the WLRT choice?

Corrugated metal siding is popular for renovating existing houses and constructing new ones. Its low cost is definitely a factor. Sometimes when metal siding is installed it looks decidedly boring. Maybe that is intentional, for example smooth siding on a side wall that isn’t supposed to attract attention. My liking for corrugated siding comes in part from its texture. Running the pattern in two directions or two colours can be fun, as evidenced by this picture of the Capri Pants Housing from  the previous post:   or from the checker board texture on the exterior of MEC in Westboro. Occasionally, there is … Continue reading Not corrugated metal siding

Construction crews are busy greening the new OTrain multi-user pathway. Today, they have started spraying on the grass seed. An accompanying mulch shades the seeds a bit, and its bright green colour shows where the seed has been spread.   the turquoise-green isn’t totally convincing, not nearly as much as the green dye sprayed on lawns to make them green in warm dry climates like Florida and Arizona.  Continue reading Spring in sprung, the grass is … painted on

The strip of greenspace that runs between Byron and Richmond Roads in the west end is either a linear park, or a transit right-of-way, depending on your view as to the availability of said space for the LRT transit initiative. The WLRT design folks are trying to tread a difficult path in saying they will use some of the Richmond Road right of way for LRT but not the linear park. It just doesn’t seem readily apparent that this can be done. As a member of the Public Advisory Committee (PAC) for the WLRT, I had my share of frustrations … Continue reading western LRT (part ii) : Byron strip

Not unexpectedly, the four “finalists” for the western continuation of the LRT mainline are all variations of the Richmond Road / Macdonald parkway alignment. In the next posts, I’ll look at several aspects of the route selection, but first, to Dominion Station.  All four options show Dominion Station right where it is, the western-most point of the transitway trench where it joints the Macdonald Parkway.   The current Dominion Station was a last-minute add-on to the transitway. It does provide convenient walk-in service for the adjacent low density housing and a cluster of high rises. Many buses had to stop at … Continue reading Western LRT (part i): Dominion Station

  Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you. At least the sticker is well printed and properly applied. It makes for a better environment than the hate-weenie who sticks up bright green Stop stickers everywhere. Continue reading Listen Up !

  I spotted this mini van parked on Somerset opposite the Plant Pool complex. What poor parking ! Didn’t even pull all the way into the space. What a lazy parker ! Then I went around to the front of the car and saw this:   Another lazy parker ! They can’t even be bothered to park their car in the space when its free and carefully bricked out for them. Or maybe they arrived together, how else could two cars so conveniently share one space? Sorry, I fail to understand that attraction of treadmill running so much that they can’t use … Continue reading Cozy Parker