OC Transpo

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by YOWetal

Where do you see progress ?

Off the top:

- Ottawa was way off the mark compared to other cities in the new-fangled "condo" "boom" that began in the 1990s, but we are now building more multi-storey dense housing in the city centre than any time since the 1960s-70s wave. We have added thousands of households to the city centre this century.

- Bike lanes were non-existent then.

- Also non-existent: Corkstown, Adawe, Flora, Commanda bridges.

- the U of O campus was brutalism and parking lots. Lots of infill and adaptation has changed the area much for the better.

- Builders have gotten a lot better at ground-floor activities and presence, compared to the street-killers that are still killing streets 30, 40, 50 years later.

- Mid-century "ribbon suburbs", much despised by Greber, are urbanizing - Richmond Road, Beechwood come to mind. Hopefully the Boomer-era suburban stroads will soon start seeing the same, if we allow and encourage it.

Over the past (mumbles number under breath) decades, urban Ottawa has gotten a LOT more urban, and a lot more appreciative of the urban. A lot of anti-urban biases, beliefs, and misapprehensions have diminished.

Unfortunately, the suburbs grew, and were permitted, encouraged, and subsidized to grow, at a much faster rate.

And compared to other larger Canadian metro areas in the Not-T/M/V category, which other one has enough old-school "urban fabric" to play with as a baseline for embracing urbanism? Calgary and Edmonton certainly don't. Winnipeg, Hamilton, London, Halifax, Quebec, Victoria, etc. have lots of interesting "fabric", but Ottawa's comparable zone is still larger than any of theirs.

I mean, I'm a crank who shits on Stupid Ottawa Stuff, but there's also some perspective to be had by visiting, like, Moncton or Barrie or something.

Even just flipping back and forth between now and some "then" on GeoOttawa will show that there's been a lot of positive change, too.

LRT phase 2 will help a lot but still leaves out a lot.

The lack of a decent, realistic, and fundamentally FAIR transit plan for the inner urban neighbourhoods is an ongoing stain on this city's politics.