I have to thank the folks at Ecology Ottawa for getting in touch with me for a response to the Bank Street South Functional Design Plan reveal. I had meant to write something, but one thing drove out another. But I had wanted to talk about the design, and what a surprise it was.
I was actually blindsided by how good
the design was. It seemed to me as though there was more radical and
more far-reaching work going into the pedestrian and cycling
experience of the street than I've seen in any other proposal like
this. I'm used to hoping for cycle tracks and getting sharrows. My
jaw dropped when they led with “segregated cycle tracks on both
sides of the street for the length of the project area.” It dropped
further when they got into landscaped boulevards, tree planting, and
fixing the traffic patterns at Riverside and Bank and the Transitway
exit at Billings Bridge Station.
It looks like a lot of thought has gone
into pedestrian and cycling traffic patterns – there are sections
of the street where they're putting in bidirectional cycle tracks
because the majority of people are just hopping on Bank for a couple
of blocks and shouldn't have to cross the street at one point only to
cross back. They've tackled the lack of points to cross by adding a
couple of signalized intersections. I was only really disappointed by
the lack of infrastructure to address the dangerous intersection of
Riverside and Bank at the Billings Bridge – a pet project of mine -
and what I thought was a bit of a missed opportunity to fix the
two-lane left onto Bank at Alta Vista to make it safer for cyclists.
The Riverside intersection at the
bridge is at the extreme edge of the study area and the bridge itself
is not within the scope. This means that they have designed in, as
well as they can, a transition from the protected cycle tracks south
of it to the sharrows over the bridge. They step down the cycle track
to an on-street lane for a bit before the bridge, to ease cyclists
into traffic, but you'll still need to ride a shared lane over the
bridge, and into Old Ottawa South.
The two-way turn off Alta Vista
involves one dedicated left-turn lane and one lane where you could go
left or right. Left-turning cyclists are required to take the lane at
the intersection, possibly blocking and annoying drivers who want to
turn right. The intersection itself is within the design area but
Alta Vista is not, and at the moment there is not much being done to
address that situation. It's a minor thing, though, and I'm happy to
claim the lane on Alta Vista if I can turn onto a protected track at
the end.
The addition of grass and trees (if
they can manage it) will do a lot to make the street more pleasant:
right now it's a bit of a concrete wasteland. I don't know if they
can manage to have grass right up against the road – that whole
part of the city is full of kill strips that are paved over because
grass can't survive that close to the street. However, the cycle
tracks might be a decent buffer. I think they're doing a lot of that
streetscaping in anticipation of the area becoming more residential,
with a few high density condos going in west of Bank. I was also sort
of surprised that their traffic models showed a decrease in car
traffic in the future. I guess that is because of the transit links
that are coming with light rail and the development of other ways to
get to suburbs like Riverside South, but at least one person in the
presentation disagreed and yelled out “they're wrong!” when the
planners said traffic was going down by 5% in the future.
Another advantage for the planners is
that the businesses can't object on the basis of losing parking –
there was never parking on this street. In fact, I can't really see a
reason for businesses to object. Aside from a minor slowing effect,
drivers aren't losing much here. I don't think they've lost a single
travel lane. I overheard people who, before the presentation, were
grumbling that “the only people who win here are the cyclists,”
but he was complaining about the conversion of the two-way left turn
lane in the middle to a standard alternating left lane, and once the
presentation was underway it was pretty clear there was no real
reason to object to getting rid of the two-way left lane.
No one really seemed to be able to come
up with any actual traffic flow concerns. Objections seemed to
generally cluster under the local community association's belief that
they were trying to turn the street into “something it's not” and
cut off access to side streets. One vehicular cyclist was vehement
that the cycle tracks, which bend outward around the major
intersections (Dutch style) were dangerous, but he seemed to be going
from the VC perspective that cyclists should be traveling at 40-50
kph and in the car lane. (He also seemed to think that helmets were
only really any use at slow speeds, because apparently you “fall
backwards” more at slow speeds and, therefore, the Dutch, who don't
wear helmets and bike slowly, have no idea what they're talking about
when it comes to safety.)
I tried to muster my skepticism, but it
was hard. The improvements to a street that I am forced to ride on,
and that I hate riding on so much, were so sweeping I couldn't help
but cheer. And they pulled it off without really “taking”
anything substantive from drivers or businesses. I hope the
implementation phase holds on to these changes.
This is a very encouraging design. Yes, there's room to improve, butclearly there's some thinking at City Hall that is going in the right direction.
ReplyDeleteMy skepticism is that while there's less to object to for drivers, the value engineering process will threaten some of the better elements, like landscaping and raised bike lanes. Hopefully with the right amount of pressure we can defend some of that, and start urbanizing Bank Street south of the Rideau River.
I know this an an old post... but I was looking at the functional plan and they actually did address your concerns at Alta Vista and Bank. There is a cycle track that starts on Alta Vista in advance of the intersection, and a cross-ride.
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