New condo towers planned for already clogged Rideau and King Edward
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN October 28, 2013 6:00 PM
OTTAWA — Rideau Street near King Edward is already so crammed with cars that adding two 27-storey towers to an already crowded block won’t make traffic any worse, says an application to the city.
That means it wouldn’t be developer DCR Phoenix’s responsibility to pay for any changes to make the roads work any better, to accommodate the buildings it wants to construct on a property now occupied by Dworkin Furs.
The two towers would be one behind the other, one facing Rideau and one facing Besserer Street to the south, with a three-storey podium as their base. They’d have 182 condos plus four storeys of underground parking run entirely by a robot valet system that whisks cars in and out of about 100 parking spots using motorized platforms.
When you’re erecting something that big in a busy neighbourhood, you have to show what the effect of all the extra cars will be on the neighbourhood. If your new building is going to break an intersection, you’ll likely have to pay for “improvements” like road-widening or a new turn lane to deal with the traffic you’re bringing in.
In this case, DCR Phoenix’s transportation study says nothing needs to be done to the nearby streets because those that will be overloaded after the buildings go up are overloaded already. As the study puts it more formally: “The failure level of services along the Rideau Street and King Edward Avenue corridors represent pre-existing conditions and are independent of the proposed 256 Rideau development and future background growth assumptions.”
The city has recently rebuilt Rideau and King Edward and tried to make them run more smoothly, which means they’re probably as good as they’re ever going to get. But the traffic in all directions where they cross is formally considered to be failing, especially at afternoon rush hour. Westbound traffic at nearby Rideau and Cumberland Street is in a failing state then, too, and so are the intersections of Daly and King Edward and also Besserer and Waller streets.
Adding traffic to a road that’s officially overloaded can make it worse, of course, but there’s no grade worse than F, no new state of technical awfulness for the road to plumb.
The robot valets should actually help. The system is to use two bays where residents of the building will park their cars, unload them and punch in passcodes, then walk away while the mobile platforms stow the vehicles in prescribed spaces underground. It’s not the first of its kind in Ottawa (the Eddy, a smaller condo project on Wellington Street, is to include a similar system and one of the buildings on LeBreton Flats uses a variant) but it will probably be the largest when it’s done.
Getting and stashing cars will take about a minute to a minute-and-a-half each, excluding the time it takes for people to get in and out themselves, meaning there’s a limit to how many vehicles will leave the garage at once. There should be enough room inside the garage for people waiting to park without forcing a queue outside the entrance on Besserer Street, the transportation report says. And Besserer, the main way in and out, can handle that traffic.
The twin 27-storey towers are in an area that’s recently seen a condo boom. Besides a pair of towers farther west on Rideau built by Claridge, Besserer Street has several slightly shorter buildings recently constructed and the traffic study notes another 700 units are planned in three more buildings. The major LCBO store and a Metro on the other side of Rideau will eventually sprout towers, too. That’s in addition to development all over the city, all of it contributing something to the traffic at major intersections.
Most of which is considered “background” traffic, contributed to Sandy Hill and Lowertown in the same way as traffic emanating from those neighbourhoods is part of background traffic elsewhere. It’s the standard way to conduct a transportation study.
“That’s been brought up by residents for a long period of time, that the city should give an umbrella view, not project by project,” said Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury, who represents the area. There’s just no good mechanism for doing it.
He has bigger problems with the development: It’s too much on a skinny lot, Fleury believes, and he doesn’t think much of the design he’s seen (simple drawings by Montreal architects Béïque Legault Thuot show one face with no windows, just patterned concrete panels). And the truck route along Rideau and King Edward is more problematic than another couple of hundred cars, he said. But indeed, with the intersection of Rideau and King Edward already failing, and probably permanently so, there’s no way to stop it from getting worse.
“It’s downtown, the roads are busy, I think people just expect that,” Fleury said.
The site is already zoned for tall buildings so ordinarily getting approval for the plans would be routine without a vote by politicians. Fleury said he’s watching the project closely, though, and will ask council’s planning committee to intervene if negotiations on the details go badly.
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