Pedestrian Bridges
 

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Co...050/story.html

http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465...n?size=620x400

Thoughts?

I think they would be good. Kind of sad it took them 20 years to build the first one, and only then discovered people actually like cycling & walking across bridges.

Add a third - from Clegg across to Hurdman. That would be a great way to serve St. Paul's University.

I think that this is a real opportunity in city-building. One of the region's greatest features are its four impressive waterways (Canal, Rideau River, Ottawa River and Gatineau) - however these also divide our city. A neighbourhood like Overbrook feels very distant from downtown, but with the Donald-Somerset and then Corktown bridges, that can change. The Fifth Avenue, and Dado's proposed Clegg-Hurdman bridges would end the relative isolation of Ottawa East.

These are (relatively) inexpensive ways to build the right kind of city, one that becomes more truly urban.

As long as this process does not take 25 years, I'm all for it.

A fourth and a fifth could be bridges on both ends of Leonard Avenue in Old Ottawa South. The Bank Street and Bronson Ave bridges are brutal on a bike, and it would be nice to have an alternate route in between these. The Percy/Craig corridor is an ideal way to bike into downtown from the Glebe, and if this axis is somehow extended farther more cyclists could use it. From Data Centre road, a pathway link could even go all the way to the Airport.

Agreed. These can't get built fast enough.

For something like this, do they really need to do a study first? Just build the damn things and save a million dollars.

Oh really... this is just too easy!

"We have a process to follow."

We shouldn't stop at mere "footbridges". These crossings should all be constructed with both pedestrians and cyclists in mind, with dedicated "lanes" for each, and tying directly into the City's cycling network. Looking at that map... it seems obvious that Somerset and Donald Streets should have dedicated bike lanes built on them, to allow riders better access to the City core via an east-west cycling route. There are very few good routes for a cyclist to take to cross the Rideau River and the Canal.

The problem? Take a look at the Corkstown Bridge:
http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=rk3...42&lvl=2&sty=b

Does that look like it integrates well into an east-west cycling network? Not to me. Just how do cyclists get across the U of O campus efficiently? What awkward ramps that just dump cyclists onto a pedestrian only campus access point.

It's not as bad as it looks. Marie-Curie (the extension of Somerset into the campus) has a dedicated, segregated contra-flow bike lane that leads directly to the ramps and provides 2-way bike access to the bridge.

The Somerset East bridge to Donald Street would be very good. Currently the intersections at Montreal and North River, and Montreal and Vanier are both a nightmare for pedestrians and cyclists.

Encouraging bike/foot traffic to cross at a Somerset-Donald bridge has a few benefits. North River is fairly quiet except for at the Montreal intersection, so crossing the street becomes much safer. The location of the bridge is still quite close to the Vanier Towers (only a couple blocks farther than Montreal Rd). Additionally, the bridge would do a lot to showcase the river, as well as the parks on both sides.

I'm definitely in favour of the Overbrook-Sandy Hill bridge.

Old Ottawa East-Glebe is also a good idea, I think. It would probably be helpful for traffic issues should the CFL and/or pro soccer end up at Lansdowne.

I wonder if anyone from Sandy Hill will complain about letting the riff-raff in over the Donald Street bridge. If they do then I'd like to preemptively laugh at them.

These are great ideas. It's nice to see the previous success recognized, embraced and emulated.

Just do it.

No more so than the residents of the Golden Triangle complained about letting the damned students walk through their neighbourhood on the way to Hooley's. I was living there at the time. Some of my neighbours were irate.

If anything, I would think that Action Sandy Hill would be in favour of getting rid of the Vanier-dwelling students more efficiently.

The somerset-donald bridge would be an excellent idea. That is one area where there are really no other crossing that are terribly close, plus it would join in nicely with Corktown one creating a nice straight route on mostly low-traffic roads.

As for the riff-raff, that sorta "West-vanier" area is actually becoming very swanky. There are a number of new condo developments around there along with nice town houses and such. There are apartments that rent in $1800+ a month range. The area is not perfect yet, but is becoming pretty awesome quickly.

I would agree that the bike routes to the southend are terrible. We have built the Airport Parkway, the O-Train and the Transitway along the Sawmill Creek corridor but no multiuse pathways, leaving cyclists to Bank and the Airport Parkway (expressway), which are far from ideal.

We do forget that the North-South LRT project would have given us a pedestrian bridge between Vincent Massey Park (and the Rideau River bike trails) and Carleton University. Seems to me, that was roundly criticized at the time.

I fully support the idea of making Ottawa more walkable and bikeable and key pedestrian bridges will be a big improvement. This is all part of the puzzle in reducing our dependance on cars for travelling everywhere. Let's get moving on these bridges. It is time for city council to actually get something done. We pay them to make decisions, not just to endlessly debate.

Citizen Editorial
 

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion...939/story.html

And then you get nonsense like this letter in today's Citizen. Elgin St. has become a bar strip since the bridge was built? Really?


Bridge to bacchanal


By David M. Beckett, The Ottawa CitizenNovember 23, 2009

Re: Fans of footbridges, Nov. 20.

It is easy to love the Corktown Bridge. When I use it, I love it. The design is stunning and the location is ideal. For most people, that is. We just sold our condo on Somerset Street West in large part because of the noise of late-night clubgoers, heading between the University of Ottawa and the Elgin Street area.

What is now known as "the Elgin Strip" used to be a neighbourhood street with useful stores and services. Since the Corktown Bridge was built, it has become a bar strip that is not in keeping with the residential neighbourhood it bisects.

The noise on weekend nights, well past 2 a.m., is extreme, and broken beer bottles, property damage and vandalism are becoming much more common. And heaven help people who want to sleep if there's "a big game" on TV.

When we moved to Somerset Street, the bridge wasn't there, so the problems weren't there. So please don't tell us that we knew what we were getting ourselves into.

David M. Beckett,

David M. Beckett is a maroon.

Agreed.

Elgin has been a bar strip for a long time before the Corktown Bridge was built.

City has a page up on Class EA for the connection between Coventry Rd and the Train station, first consultations are in March
http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html

Conventry/Train ped. bridge open house 13 May 2010 http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html

^open house display boards
http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../poh_1_en.html

:previous:

*sigh* The bridge is to be in by 2015. Why must even small projects take so long in this city?

Because wouldn't it be terrible to rush through the development process and end up with something mediocre? And "out-of-place"? No, better to draw it out as long as possible so that the project seems to evolve organically as if self-generated... or produced techtonically, like a mountain range or a continent. I was going to say glacier, but those don't seem to be doing so well just now.

page not found
 

page not found

:previous:

The Citizen must have taken the article down - the link was to their website. Next time I'll quote the article in the post.

In summary: it was about the City studying two locations for pedestrian bridges - one accross the Rideau river connecting Somerset St. E in Sandy Hill to Donald St. in Overbrook, and the other connecting Fifth Avenue in the Glebe to Clegg St. in Old Ottawa East.

Corktown’s success drives interest in pedestrian bridges

Popularity of once-controversial span spurs committee to OK $1M feasibility study

By Patrick Dare, The Ottawa CitizenNovember 10, 2009 12:02 AM

Pedestrian Bridges
Photograph by: Robert Cross, The Ottawa Citizen.
OTTAWA — The Corktown Bridge has been so successful that the City of Ottawa is going ahead with a $1-million feasibility study on two other pedestrian bridges.

The Corktown Bridge is the pedestrian-cycling bridge across the Rideau Canal that links the University of Ottawa with the Golden Triangle neighbourhood of central Ottawa. Construction of the $5-million bridge was hugely controversial, with many councillors saying it was a waste of money because the Laurier Bridge was nearby.

It narrowly won approval, was built, and has become one of the city’s most applauded public projects. Day and night, pedestrians and cyclists cross the canal on the bridge and many visitors have commended the city for the look of the structure and the fact that it has created a new view of central Ottawa.

On Monday, the transportation committee approved a budget that includes the feasibility study on two more pedestrian-cycling bridges. One of the bridges, proposed by Capital Councillor Clive Doucet, would link Fifth Avenue in the Glebe with Clegg Street in Ottawa East. The other would span the Rideau River, connecting Donald Street in Overbrook with Somerset Street East in Sandy Hill.

Mona Abouhenidy, manager of strategic transportation planning for the city, said there’s been a shift in opinion on council about such projects due to the success of the Corktown Bridge.

She said the bridge has become an important link between neighbourhoods and is popular even in winter, when fewer people are walking or cycling and the Rideau Canal is frozen.

“It has been successful. We underestimated the value of it,” Gloucester-South Nepean Councillor Steve Desroches said. “It has exceeded expectations.”

If the feasibility study supports the proposed bridges, they could be built within four to five years.

The proposed new bridge over the canal would require a lot of consultations with the federal government because of the canal’s designation as a world heritage site. The Corktown Bridge took 20 years to build, largely due to the need to get approvals.

But Councillor Jacques Legendre, of Rideau-Rockcliffe, hopes that the pedestrian bridge between Donald Street and Somerset Street could be easily engineered, approved without much difficulty and constructed for a relatively modest amount of money.

Legendre says that the water in the Rideau River there is only about ankle-deep and that section of the river is very flat; in fact, people roll up their trousers and walk across the river in summer.

He says that without a navigable waterway to cross, the pedestrian bridge need not be elaborate and there are far fewer planning problems. The other alternative in the area for pedestrians and cyclists is the Cummings Bridge, which has only one bicycle lane and a lot of fast-moving traffic.

Legendre recently discovered that many years ago, there was a wooden pedestrian bridge on posts at the Rideau River location. In winter, the bridge would be taken out.

Legendre says that if the Donald Street-Somerset Street bridge is built, people could easily walk or cycle all the way from Overbrook to downtown without having to deal with heavy traffic on streets such as Montreal Road.

“It makes the city more livable,” said Legendre.

Doucet said the study, coupled with about $16 million planned to be spent in 2010 for cycling and pedestrian facilities, were “glimmers of hope” for a city that usually spends almost all its transportation money on roads.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

canal bridge blog

http://rideaucanalbridge.ca/

open house 1 materials
http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html

open ohuse #2 for the canal ped bridge on Nov 17th
http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html

display boards are up

EA study recommendations for the Rideau River pedestrian bridge.

http://www.ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa...e%20Report.htm

And article from the Citizen

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/ot...309/story.html

Rideau River pedestrian bridge approved by the transportation committee

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Tr...305/story.html

Train to Terminal
 

A connection between the Ottawa Train Station and Terminal Ave. would be very useful.
http://maps.google.com/maps?rlz=1T4G...ed=0CCQQ8gEwAA

And considering also the people who will be working at the 10-story building under construction there. The building is topped off, so maybe the city should start to think about that connection pretty soon.

Multi-Use Crossing of the O-Train Corridor near Hickory Street
http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/publi.../index_en.html

http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/publi...index_en-1.jpg

You're in luck because exactly such a connection is being built along with the office building. :tup:

From http://www.canderel.com/news-communi...-station-lands:

Well the next office tower. The one currently being built is not the Canderel one. But there is a RFP out for government office space that fits 425 Terminal Ave perfectly. Lets hope it gets built or the train yards will have not only failed on the commerical side but also there office park.

Cheers,
Josh

Trainyards is already a dismal failure as near as I can tell, at least from a planning and place-making point of view.

Why do you think its a failure?

It's your standard big-box development without a thought of making the area more walkable and integrating it into the nearby transit links. When you take a plot of land that is in the central city and has so many potential advantages and build something that you'd find in Barrhaven, that is a failure.

Those pedestrian connections especially the Coventry one should have been done a long time ago. Even with the RCMP headquarters that moved out to Barrhaven, there are still a good number of federal workers in the area north of the 417 and other businesses as well plus the Hampton Hotel and the Stadium. The area right now gets infrequent bus service with the 9 and 18 right now while they had other routes before the nonsense cuts last year.

Good point about the Hampton Inn and Conferrence Centre; it is really going to get a benefit from a direct bridge from its parking lot to the Rapid Transit Station and the VIA Station. I'll bet that it is not putting a cent toward the work though. (Maybe the City didn't think to ask.)

More big-boxy big-parking isolated ugliness. Total and utter crap.

Design concepts for Rideau Canal crossing at Clegg/Fifth are very promising:

http://www.emcottawasouth.ca/20120719/news

http://www.emcimport.com/infomart/im...0151-27600.jpg

Rideau Canal crossing meeting tonight. here are the display boards
http://ottawa.ca/en/city_hall/planni...play/index.htm

What do they have against putting everything on one big PDF?

Looks great! I love the design.

Im loving the design too! Is this a final design or a concept from which architecture firms can begin bidding?