Chianello: In defence of NIMBYism: Why Lakeside Avenue is rightly peeved
Joanne Chianello, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: August 9, 2014
While it's been a great party inside the stadium, some residents living a short distance from Lansdowne have cause to complain, writes Joanne Chianello.
Sometimes NIMBYism gets a bad rap.
Apparently, to avoid being tagged as indulging in Not-In-My-Backyard hypocrisy, we’re supposed to be thrilled when, say, a 15-storey condo goes up at the end of our leafy residential street. Density is great! We are likewise expected to jump for joy when the city reroutes hundreds of transit buses down our quiet blocks.
That is, of course, ridiculous. We don’t as a rule feign delight when our environs are disrupted. Yet we tend to shrug our collective shoulders at the annoyances other parts of the city might experience — the indifference that’s the flip side of the Not-In-My-Back-Yard mentality.
It’s a natural instinct. That’s not to say that NIMBYism is desirable — if we want the city to grow and improve, we all need to embrace change and, sometimes, inconvenience — but it’s understandable.
Not every complaint about new development can be reduced to mere NIMBYism, though. Case in point: the Lakeside Avenue residents’ protest against hundreds of football-game shuttles trundling down their normally serene residential street.
In an effort to get thousands of fans to Redblacks games, CFL-franchise owner Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group is running shuttles from four off-site parking lots to Lansdowne Park. The shuttles are a great idea. Lansdowne isn’t on any major transportation or rapid-transit routes, and there isn’t room for most fans to drive — or park — at (or even near) the TD Place stadium.
There’s only one catch, at least for the 20 or so homeowners who live on Lakeside: Their tiny street is being used by these shuttles to connect from Bronson Avenue to Queen Elizabeth Driveway. While OSEG employs 90 shuttles for each game, each vehicle makes multiple runs. That means more than 500 bus trips down the street for hours on game nights.
The central argument against the complainants seems to be that they should expect to be inconvenienced as they live near Lansdowne. This is not fair. One might make that argument in regards to, say, the folks who live on Holmwood Avenue and now face a wall of development where there used to be a park. You have to feel for those people. But they did locate right across from Lansdowne Park, where development was always a real possibility.
However, Lakeside Avenue is many blocks from Lansdowne. Residents aren’t complaining about mere noise, or more traffic. They’re upset because buses are clogging their street on game nights (and might for other big events at Lansdowne in the future, such as major concerts). This residential side street is not meant to be a thoroughfare, a fact that the city recognizes because cars travelling north on Bronson usually aren’t allowed to turn left onto Lakeside. But the city has made an exception for the OSEG shuttles.
There isn’t a person in Ottawa who wouldn’t be furious if this happened on his or her own street, even if it was only a dozen times a year.
Still, there are two sides to every argument. OSEG’s is also a valid one. Alternative routes that don’t use Lakeside to get to Queen Elizabeth Drive would take longer. If we want people to take the bus to games, then we need to make it as convenient as we can for ticketholders. That means keeping the commute brief. Well, as brief as possible.
Perhaps Spock (with apologies to philosopher Jeremy Bentham) was right when he said that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Delaying thousands of game-goers — and potentially prompting them to take their cars next time — wouldn’t help anyone. In fact, that might well cause worse traffic in the Glebe.
So what’s to be done? OSEG may try other routes later in the season. They absolutely should — at least to provide concrete metrics by which to judge the route that inconveniences the fewest people. Perhaps football fans wouldn’t protest spending an extra five minutes on a bus to spare their fell0w citizens on Lakeside, but a 20-minute delay would burn up any goodwill they might harbour toward the Glebe-ites.
There’s probably no perfect solution for this traffic conundrum. But dismissing the complaints of Lakeside Avenue as NIMBYism amounts to adding gratuitous insult to real injury.
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This would have to go back well before the Lansdowne transportation plan then. What other issues have they been having on that street in terms of traffic?
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