The Ugly In Ottawa: MULVIHILL
Ottawa is beautiful but needs a few tweaks.
Boulevards and curbside grass are filled with weeds. The visual isn’t pretty.
Green spaces, parks, soccer fields, playgrounds are dandelion heaven … an ever expanding sea of yellow.
There are streets filled with major cracks and potholes that are difficult to safely navigate in a vehicle, never mind a bike. Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s recent video is simply a word-filled acknowledgement that the problem exists. Stomp and patch fixes just don’t cut it. Sutcliffe must understand that the deterioration is getting worse, not better, has been doing so for years.
Development is booming but unfortunately infrastructure is not. It takes years for adequate roads to be built to accommodate ever increasing traffic. Adequate transit services are slow to reach residential areas. Expanding the city before funding is made available for necessary services might not be the best idea. Perhaps a smaller footprint would be a better use of taxpayer dollars?
Massively wide sidewalks, or multi-use pathways, are installed in new residential areas to provide for shortened laneways with the result being cars parked on both sides of streets hindering the safe flow of traffic and pedestrians. Cope Drive in Kanata is an excellent example of poor planning with town homes on both sides, extra wide sidewalks, three schools, OC Transpo stops, and cars parked on both sides of the road. Let’s add to that traffic circles. Clearly, design safety wasn’t the city planners’ first priority.
There is so much potential for improved, aesthetically pleasing development in older sections of this city but what seems to be the norm are big, square boxes with big, square windows cookie-cutter style … no differentiation just blah, bland, boring, and certainly nothing that excels. Is this how the future looks? …
Surely as the capital and a prime vacation destination, Ottawa planning talent must stop accepting mediocrity.
Generations to come deserve better.
Donna Mulvihill is a community activist and former hospital coordinator.
For You:
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City Hall Can’t Fill A Pothole: BENN
Albion, Lester Roads Get Repair
What Will Be The Fate Of The Budget Watchdog?
One Size Does Not Fit All In Traffic: QUOTABLE
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DM, planning talent in Ottawa, if such a thing exists, is not to actually do planning. Several years ago the planners were given the mandate to provide concierge services to the growing developer community. Now,their main focus appears to be, rubber stamping any cookie-cutter style townhouse that is presented by a developer.
“Little boxes all the same. / There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one, / And they’re all made out of ticky tacky / And they all look just the same.” (With thanks to Pete Seeger.) We really don’t seem to have progressed much beyond the ’50s in many respects, do we? Were the ’50s the Golden Age?