Sparks Street

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by acottawa

I head for a garage as well, but Eastern Ontario has an obsession with on street parking which isn’t going away anytime soon.

This isn't really an Eastern Ontario phenomenon. It's people either being lazy or being accustomed to parking in front of whatever they are visiting, whether they're rural or suburban or whatever they may be. People would rather drive around in circles looking for something close than park and walk ten minutes. If Ottawa improves its transit accessibility to the CBD (which it will be) then there should be more users arriving by transit than by car.

Originally Posted by acottawa

It gets people (parker’s, cyclists, transit users) on the street, which is better than the current situation most of the time.

I'd rather have Sparks at its current state than making it a traversable street for cars. It's a nice pedestrian mall and much nicer than weaving through people on tight sidewalks next to buses going 40+kph. I will say that the widened sidewalks on Queen are much improved from the previous layout.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by JHikka

This isn't really an Eastern Ontario phenomenon. It's people either being lazy or being accustomed to parking in front of whatever they are visiting, whether they're rural or suburban or whatever they may be. People would rather drive around in circles looking for something close than park and walk ten minutes. If Ottawa improves its transit accessibility to the CBD (which it will be) then there should be more users arriving by transit than by car.


I'd rather have Sparks at its current state than making it a traversable street for cars. It's a nice pedestrian mall and much nicer than weaving through people on tight sidewalks next to buses going 40+kph. I will say that the widened sidewalks on Queen are much improved from the previous layout.

Why would the sidewalk designs need to be tight? I wasn’t suggesting a 4 lane street.

I think it is an Eastern Ontario thing. In SW Ontario people generally park at a central location, same with Western Canada.

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by acottawa

Why would the sidewalk designs need to be tight? I wasn’t suggesting a 4 lane street.

If you're proposing a street for through-traffic and on-street parking then you're looking at a street that is four cars wide, essentially.

[Mikeed]

I just want a place to hangout outside downtown and people watch.

Shade and nice places to sit is all I really care about.

[acottawa]

Originally Posted by JHikka

If you're proposing a street for through-traffic and on-street parking then you're looking at a street that is four cars wide, essentially.

One traffic lane 3m
One bus/parking lane 3m
One cycle track 3m

The ROW appears to be 18m, so that would leave room for a 3m sidewalk on the North side and a 6m sidewalk on the south side.

[lrt's friend]

no way should we turn Sparks Street into a second Queen Street or worse with on street parking. Sounds like, we will need to restrict or close down the restaurant patios. For what? That will make Sparks Street worse. We have long ago altered Sparks at Confederation Square that would allow it to be useful for transit. And it will be no good for cycling either if were going to return to on street parking. I don't understand this kind of vision.

[acottawa]

Patios across the city and around the world function without restricting the street to pedestrians.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by YOWhopeful

All ground floor retail at 240 Sparks is gone.

Yet with the Three Brewers anchoring that corner, it's got more life in it than it has pretty much since that abominable building went up.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

The street will look a whole lot better with these improvements, but this plan does not address the root of the problem; lack of interesting retail, early closing hours, overpriced rents and lack of residents.

The root of the problem is that the Government of Canada owns or occupies far too much of the real estate on the street.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

Transit users will be 2-3 blocks closer once the Confederation Line opens

* LRT users will be.

OC Transpo has completely buggered up the local buses that go anywhere near Sparks, though.

There's more to transit than the LRT.

if they could advertise the Zellers entrance as a Confederation/Sparks entrance/exit and add more entrances to Sparks or direct people between the two, it would go a long way to helping the situation.

If they could not have screwed up the configuration of bus routes 5 through 19, and unscrew the upscrewing that they have screwed, it would go even further.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

Absolutely. It will be very difficult to erase past serious errors, particularly constructing buildings with no street interaction. Terrible planning from the 1960s and 1970s like the buildings between Bank and Kent. Basically a wasteland.

Nevertheless, we can't give up. We need to make an effort to re-animate the street somehow.

One of the two buildings between Bank and Kent actually did a very successful refit to accommodate the brew pub, which has done more than anything, ever, to breathe life into Sparks west of Bank, if barely.

The Bank of Canada is a lost cause, and the redo of the plaza was a big wasted opportunity, but the Three Brewers project, along with perhaps the food courty-place in whatever Met/Clarica/Sun building is called these days (it's almost time for another of its half-decade name changes), and the pub in the ground floor of Place Bell at Elgin, are pretty good examples for how brutal downtown commercial buildings should retrofit themselves as the opportunities arise.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by Mikeed

I just want a place to hangout outside downtown and people watch.

Shade and nice places to sit is all I really care about.

Shade? The NCC and PWGSC spent the 80s and 90s obsessing over making sure people on Sparks got sufficient doses of UV.

In the summer, the shadier side of downtown streets are almost always the busier ones for pedestrians and lurkers.

[rocketphish]

Throwing money at Sparks Street will make the whole city 'sorry'
It takes a village of bureaucrats to reconstruct one pedestrian mall.

Randall Denley, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: November 19, 2019

The city’s latest plan to fix Sparks Street is carefully positioned somewhere between grandiose and bizarre, but it’s the price tag that is really startling. Over the next few years, the city plans to spend up to $83 million on the latest attempt to revive the moribund pedestrian mall.

For that price, one would have expected to hear that the street was going to be paved with gold, but instead, a plan city council will consider next week offers only platitudes, wishful thinking and some street trees.

City consultants have developed the plan over the last two years with the help of the National Capital Commission, Public Services and Procurement Canada, the Sparks Street Mall Authority and the Sparks Street BIA. It takes a village of bureaucrats to reconstruct one street.

The plan cost $250,000 and the result is a proposal that connoisseurs of such documents will savour. It is both baroque and beyond satire.

First, one must consider the “vision” behind the plan. Sparks is already “a key civic street of national and international importance,” you will be surprised to know, but it will only get better with the application of large sums of money, some of which the city hopes to get from the federal government.

The plan is to provide “spaces and programming that celebrates and publicly reinforces the broad values and diverse traditions that unify us as Canadians. Our connections to nature, our winter resilience, inclusion, equity, reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, sustainability, CBC, hockey, poutine, maple syrup, being sorry and so on.”

That seems like a lot to accomplish within a five-block pedestrian mall, but it’s the “being sorry” element of our national character that is particularly eye-catching. One envisions an actor portraying Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dramatizing some of his more famous apologies.

Ottawans themselves were the first to associate Sparks Street with being sorry. We’ve been sorry about the mall for decades, and we will be a lot sorrier if the city spends millions of tax dollars in another futile fix-up.

The consultant’s report is glowing with optimism about the future of Sparks, of course, showing the usual colourful sketches of people thronging to the street. What will cause the thronging is less clear. The plan calls for “intimate gathering spaces and social activity nodes,” plus retail that will be carefully curated by bureaucrats.

Sounds fun, but don’t expect much to happen on the north side of the street any time soon. That’s owned by the federal government, which intends to revamp the buildings sometime in the next 10 to 15 years.

The proposal’s call for more trees and greenery on Sparks is appropriate, and probably about all that really needs to be done. Were Sparks developed into a natural walk similar to New York’s High Line linear park, people would be drawn to the street as an alternative to the barren high-rise canyons to the south. Such simplicity is far from what is recommended, however. Instead, the report proposes six strategic directions and 72 specific recommendations. Years of happy consulting lie ahead.

The $83 million will cover an extensive shopping list of items, but the exact costs are for another day. Right now, staff just want councillors to say “Sure, go ahead.” They are well on their way. At committee, the Sparks plan was carried without a single dissent. Did any of the members even read the report, and if they did, what in the world were they thinking?

There is one other piece of found humour in all of this. During the public consultation, the NCC held a workshop entitled “Walk This Way: Designing a Pedestrian Paradise.” For those of a certain age, it immediately brings to mind images of Marty Feldman’s classic comic moment in the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein.

Like Frankenstein, the Sparks Street Mall consists of various cadaverous parts and is a horror story that never goes away. Councillors need to bury this outmoded pedestrian mall, not try to breathe new life into it.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa political commentator and author. Learn about his new book, Spiked, at randalldenley.com. Contact him at [email protected]

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/co...ole-city-sorry

[eltodesukane]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

[B]Throwing money at Sparks Street will make the whole city 'sorry'

Should throw that money at Elgin Street, which is already a success in progress.
Wouldn't be sorry to do that.

[passwordisnt123]

Originally Posted by rocketphish

Throwing money at Sparks Street will make the whole city 'sorry'
It takes a village of bureaucrats to reconstruct one pedestrian mall.

Randall Denley, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: November 19, 2019

Sounds fun, but don’t expect much to happen on the north side of the street any time soon. That’s owned by the federal government, which intends to revamp the buildings sometime in the next 10 to 15 years.

Denley is right about the north side of the street but he leaves out the fact that the south side of the street is also mostly owned by the federal government. The difference is that the south side is owned by the NCC who contracts out the landlord and tenant relations work to a private entity whereas the north side is owned by the notoriously bureaucratic and inefficient PSPC who insist on managing it directly.

The fact that the south side of the street is leaps and bounds better and than the north side suggests to me that we could get a long way toward solving this problem with a relatively minor tweak like transferring the north side ownership to the NCC or forcing PSPC to contract out their landlord duties.

[Uhuniau]

Get rid of PSPC, sure, but for the love of all that is holy, no, not devolve their role to the NCC.

[passwordisnt123]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

Get rid of PSPC, sure, but for the love of all that is holy, no, not devolve their role to the NCC.

I think we need to give the NCC credit for recognizing their own incompetence and contracting out the landlord work to the private sector. The results speak for themselves, the south side of the street is 10x better than the north side of the street.

I mean what's an easier ask for Watson to go to the federal government with: "Can you transfer ownership of the north side of the street to the NCC?" or "Can you please divest yourself of some of the most prime land in the capital region to the private sector?"

I think the second ask will get us nowhere but the first ask is not only reasonable, I'd say it'd stand a decent chance of succeeding.

[Kitchissippi]

The federal government doesn't necessarily have to divest itself from the properties, they just have to make it a policy to retain all the ground floor spaces as street-accessible retail and hand over control to the same property management. I'd love to see Sparks Street managed holistically almost like a regular mall where the tenant mix could be optimized to attract specific market niches.

[zzptichka]

From today's NCC board meeting
SPARKS STREET PUBLIC REALM PLAN: https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/do...lm_plan_en.pdf

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by zzptichka

From today's NCC board meeting
SPARKS STREET PUBLIC REALM PLAN: https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/do...lm_plan_en.pdf

They are going out of the way to erase "bus" as a form of transportation.