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Posted Jun 4, 2012, 12:33 AM
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Planned LRT system will turn Queen Street into Ottawa’s ‘showcase’
Quote:
Planned LRT system will turn Queen Street into Ottawa’s ‘showcase’
By David Reevely, The Ottawa Citizen June 3, 2012 7:02 PM
OTTAWA — The city is planning a complete overhaul of downtown streets once the planned light-rail system opens in 2018, hoping to finally live up to a decade of big talk.
The plans are still unfinished, but they’ve been through several rounds of brainstorming and revision. Queen Street is in for the biggest change, according to the latest draft. With the opening of the rail line running underneath the road two blocks from Parliament, the city expects thousands upon thousands of riders to head there instead of to the Transitway further south.
That will create an opportunity to turn Queen into Ottawa’s “showcase street,” putting a lot of high-flying ideas about pedestrian-friendliness and human-scale design into practice.
“Queen Street is the one where it becomes very practical, because we have the train running underground on Queen and we know with the number of passengers that are going to be exiting out of there, we really have to look at what does Queen look like and how can we apportion the space to make best use of it?” says deputy city manager Nancy Schepers, who’s in charge of the planning.
It means transforming Queen from the utilitarian strip of pavement it is now, bordered mostly by narrow sidewalks and building fronts with few entrances. Queen should have “the highest level of sustainable design, not only in wide sidewalks, but also in creative designs for parking and access, priority crosswalks, street tree planting, drainage, and materials,” the plans say.
Some of this is simple engineering: With station entrances likely near Lyon, O’Connor and Metcalfe streets, the city expects the busiest parts of Queen to have as many as 5,000 people trooping along them at rush hours. All those people won’t fit on sidewalks a couple of metres wide — in fact, standard engineering formulas say the sidewalks will have to be six metres wide (20 feet) and they’ll still be crowded.
The whole city right-of-way is only 18 metres across. “Within a limited right-of-way, this will have obvious implications on the space available for cyclists and vehicles,” the plan says.
The implications are that there will be a lot less space for cyclists and vehicles, with a plan to cut Queen Street’s four lanes of asphalt to two, plus narrow strips of parking in some places. Instead of being street parking, though, the city’s thinking of a kind of sidewalk parking.
“Nowadays, we have traffic lanes that, peak periods they’re open to drive on and off-peak, they’re available for parking,” Schepers says. “This option that’s here actually flips that and says OK, we get that off-peak, parking is really important for the commercial business, but maybe during peak, rather than making that available for vehicles on Queen, maybe we should have it a dual passenger-parking zone.”
Downtown councillor Diane Holmes says she’s pleased by the proposals for Queen. The busiest stretch of sidewalk in the city now is on the east side of Metcalfe Street between Slater and Albert — a block connecting the two directions of the Transitway. Depending on the day, it gets 4,000 to 8,000 pedestrians an hour in the afternoon.
“That has very many pedestrians and the sidewalk is way too narrow. That is an unsafe sidewalk, and we can’t perpetuate that when we’re designing the streets leading to the LRT,” Holmes says.
Queen could and should be first on the list for changes, Schepers says, both because of the demand the LRT riders will put on it and because the rail construction itself will be a chance to make changes, if city council supports the final version of the plan, or even just some of it. The idea isn’t to tear up perfectly good streets, but to make improvements over many years, like when they’re torn up because they’re due to be rebuilt anyway.
“Having an answer on Queen Street would allow us to talk to the successful (rail-building) proponent, depending on how they plan to construct the light rail system, for an incremental cost, we might be able to implement some of this,” Schepers says. “Clearly at the public-access locations, they will be digging it up, and so in that general vicinity they will be restoring it. By having a plan, we can start to see the first steps of an ultimate solution starting to emerge.”
The city’s also hoping that the owners of some of the buildings along Queen Street, mostly medium-sized office towers with main entrances and little else going on at ground level, will open up to the public a little more, especially with restaurants and cafés that will have patios in warm weather. Again, the LRT is the key. As the planners put it: “Over time, buildings will become more-street oriented with active uses at grade, benefiting from the new pedestrian economic opportunity.” The city builds rail, riders come, and businesses follow.
It uses the block of Queen between Bank and O’Connor as a particular example.
The CBC’s downtown broadcast centre on the north side of that block, in use since 2004, was supposed to be more open to the public, even featuring a pedestrian passage between Queen and Sparks. But along the way the builder and owner, Morguard, scrapped the passage and put only a locked back door on Sparks. The Queen side has a public café with a couple of narrow doors.
The Sun Life Centre across the street is only a little more open: the famous Hy’s Steakhouse has a patio from which noshers and imbibers will practically be able to roll down the stairs to an LRT platform (subject to a little wiggling of that station location, on which the planners are now working), and the south side of Queen is lined with growing trees. But even so most of the building’s facade is steel and glass, doorless and flat.
That will change naturally, Schepers says. “Certainly in new development, (the city government has) a role to play in influencing what kinds of developments are appropriate … but in addition, as the community changes and evolves, we all experience how different stores will come in and start to satisfy the demands that are starting to emerge. So as areas of the downtown become more mixed-use so there’s more residents living there, that becomes a different set of shops, a different set of experiences.
“That’s not driven by the city saying, ‘Thou shalt do that,’ that’s driven by the businesses seeing a need and following through. They put together their business model, they say, ‘This is an opportunity,’ and we’ll find some people will be very smart about that.”
Queen Street’s just one example, Schepers emphasizes. The removal of 2,000 daily bus trips from downtown streets (leaving about 600 a day) creates other possibilities, too.
“I look out my window every day at the line of buses on the Mackenzie King Bridge, and one of the ideas that’s out there is making part of that bridge a walkway,” she says. “Why not? Paint it, make it a promenade that connects the National Arts Centre to Arts Court and the Convention Centre. It’s such a beautiful, beautiful corridor. You can see Parliament, you can see the canal.
“I’m really excited because I think this process will allow us to identify some opportunities that will be, not huge, but that will make a difference and that will become a treasured space for the citizens of the future,” Schepers says.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
ottawacitizen.com/greaterottawa
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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