For those who might be interested, I’ve launched a new blog dedicated to Ottawa politics, Steps from the Canal. In my first post, I take on commuter culture, urban sprawl and mass transit:
We’re proud of our use of mass transit. So many of us have escaped the pollution-spilling single car, pooling the externalities of our commute so that our desire to live as far away as possible from our workplace no longer kills the environment as quickly as it used to. We pat ourselves on the back for our green living, ignoring the black smoke pouring out the back of each articulated bus.
Zoning laws are our accomplices. Bedroom communities have been springing up for more than a generation, and they’re spreading – taking over small towns and rural communities.These are residential zones; no businesses may apply. People often choose these communities for the remoteness. The 9 to 5 drudgery must not weigh down our weekend enjoyment.
As we flee the city on our bloated red and white caterpillars, we have to go further and further to satisfy our hedonism. Land within the greenbelt is scarce. Land just outside has been consumed as quickly as possible. More and more houses are squished into less and less land. But still, the North American ideal is to have the big house with the big yard. If your measure of worth is your white picket fence, each fence post will further validate your lifestyle.
To afford these big lots, we have to escape further and further. Where Woodroffe meets highway 16 was always a pleasant escape from city lights as you made your way to Manotick, North Gower or Kars. Now, we can barely see the river for the backhoes needed for that next development. There is no sustainability to a suburban life transplanted to a rural area. The body rejects the foreign organ and only an infusion of new mass transit blood will keep it from dying.
But I guess none of you (other than Katherine) are in Ottawa, are you?
I lived and worked in Ottawa for 13 years, but left 10 years ago. Ottawa is a huge city, based on amount of land it covers, compared to its population. And are you including the Outaouais in all this? Ottawa’s colony in Quebec?
I do not drive – rather, I don’t know how to drive – and depend on public transit. I always thought Ottawa’s attitude to transit was weird. OCTranspo did one thing really well: it got you downtown to go to work in the morning. Then it did an okay job of getting you home at night. But if you lived in Gloucester and worked in Nepean or Kanata, or even in the very westend of Ottawa, you were screwed. Three transfers, minimum.
Yet what kind of transit system is focused solely on getting downtown and not across (at least most of) the city? Answer: one that was designed in a different era before heavy population in the Nepean/Gloucester/Orleans/Kanata areas and that assumed that everyone there drove a car.
I’m not sure I buy the “everyone wants big lots for their kids to play” argument: the older suburbs of Ottawa South and (damn it, I’m forgetting the names) that part of Ottawa that lies immediately south-east of the canal, curving along with it, all the way to Dow’s Lake and Carleton U. Those lots have lawns but they don’t have acreage. And yet they’re livable, serviced well by public transit and close to schools, libraries, community centres.
It can be done.
Are you thinking of Riverdale and Sunnyside? The argument I hear from so many super-suburbanites is that they’d love to live more centrally but “can’t afford a house with a yard there” and “you get more bang for your buck in the suburbs”. And while it’s true, it definitely speaks to cultural priorities. I (and the author to whom I may just be married) often have to choose my words very, very carefully in order to refrain from sounding, well, incredibly self-righteous, given our personal choice to live centrally, walk pretty much everywhere every day, and eschew owning a house with a yard, renting a decently sized – but not massive – apartment, sans yard, instead.
Yeah, I think you’re referencing Rivedale, DRS. Using that as a model for future development – rather than, say, the Barrhaven-Davidson Heights model – would be far superior. It really demonstrates that you can have an urban neighbourhood that remains a neighbourhood. It’s a rather walkable neighbourhood (though I’m not sure where the nearest grocery store is, Billings Bridge?) and if you do need to get down to the core, it’s a short bus ride (or drive).
There’s a lovely park that has festivals, a library, lots of stores, restaurants, pubs and it’s a quick jaunt to Lansdowne.
that part of Ottawa that lies immediately south-east of the canal, curving along with it, all the way to Dow’s Lake and Carleton U. Those lots have lawns but they don’t have acreage. And yet they’re livable, serviced well by public transit and close to schools, libraries, community centres.
Sandy Hill is east of the canal. Old Ottawa South is south of the canal, just beyond the Glebe.
It’s expensive to live in cities, so raging against people who live in suburbs seems to me to ignore the economic factors. But Ottawa does seem low-density compared to other large Canadian cities I’ve been to. There’s a lot more houses than apartments, even in the areas immediately south of downtown, and pretty much the only skyscrapers that exist are offices, not housing. And people preferring to live outside the city rather than have more density isn’t the only problem – there would be massive community mobilization against it if you tried to “densify”, say, the Glebe or Old Ottawa South (not to mention that you wouldn’t legally be able to do so, in a lot of cases, due to so many of the houses being heritage). Even as things stand I see people with signs on their yards objecting to things like splitting lots to fit more than one house on them. I think the city could benefit from more density, but nobody wants their neighbourhood transformed from houses into apartments, so finding a place to start would be a political challenge.
My main issue with the mass transit system is how poorly designed the O-Train is. It’s very useful for a student because it runs through Carleton, but it doesn’t go anywhere central – one end’s about a kilometre from the centre of downtown, the other end’s a mall. I’ve heard they will be extending it to run into downtown, which is a long-overdue change; on the other end, it ought to be possible to extend it to the airport, making it a genuinely valuable method of transport – the amount of traffic that could be prevented if all the people who come to Ottawa for conferences and meetings with politicians took the O-Train is huge. People will take an LRT system when they wouldn’t take buses, and it doesn’t pollute.
I think, as DRS notes, you can classify Old Ottawa South and the Glebe as fairly dense. Sure, there aren’t the skyscrapers (though those may be coming), but you do have a lot of lots squished together. And keep in mind that a lot of the density may be a little hidden. The Glebe doesn’t have a ton of apartment buildings, but it does have one of the highest rates of renters in Ottawa, and I don’t they’re all renting single family homes. There are a lot of duplexes or tri-plexes, and the commercial area on Bank St. is topped with a number of apartments.
The point, though, isn’t just density; it’s also ensuring that we have communities that don’t rely so heavily on cars and buses. The Glebe is, depending on one’s lifestyle, a completely self-contained and walk-able community. You don’t need a car to go to the grocery store, drug store, hardware store, pet store, bakery, restaurants, record store, music store, electronics store, liquor store, beer store, ice cream shop, bars, live music venues or, soon (again), sporting events. You can build a compact suburb community, like Barrhaven, and not have that.
Suburban life almost demands owning a car, or at least a bus pass. Barrhaven was built as a bedroom community with a couple of crappy little strip malls. To actually live – rather than starve – in Barrhaven you needed burn fossil fuels.
Kanata has (or had, I guess) a thriving tech industry, but it still didn’t become a walkable community. There isn’t a lot of mix-use areas. You have homes in one section and commerce in another, often remote, section.
So the problem isn’t just that people are moving to the suburbs (go right ahead), it’s that we have, through zoning restrictions, ensured that the suburbs are really far away from places where we know people will want to go.
You are right about the O-Train, but I’m willing to give them a bit of a pass for now. As a pilot project, building it along the old train tracks made sense. And since it has shown to be successful, even though it’s not the most useful route for most of us, it nicely demonstrates the value of light rail. As you say, the city has been too slow in expanding this project, but they are on the right path (just last week they signed some big deal to finalize the plans for digging the tunnel under the core).
Suburban life almost demands owning a car, or at least a bus pass. Barrhaven was built as a bedroom community with a couple of crappy little strip malls. To actually live – rather than starve – in Barrhaven you needed burn fossil fuels.
Kanata has (or had, I guess) a thriving tech industry, but it still didn’t become a walkable community. There isn’t a lot of mix-use areas. You have homes in one section and commerce in another, often remote, section.
I’m greatly in favour of making suburbs more walkable; even ones where people don’t work should be places where they can do their grocery shopping and most other activities near home. I don’t think we’ll get to the point of not having suburbs, at least not in within the next generation or two.
Good point about the Glebe having a lot of renters of rooms or suites within houses (I’m one of them). I guess when I think about density in an urban planning sense, I associate it with (tall) apartment buildings rather than houses. I agree that it’s extremely walkable.
If I had been bilingual, I would never have left Ottawa. It’s still my ideal livable city. But one has to eat, so I’m in Toronto now.
And yes, I was thinking of Riverdale and Sunnyside.