By Katherine Harding
Don Brousseau now knows that picking a new street name isn’t just about finding the best moniker — it’s also about saving lives.
Living on a street with an uncomplicated name in a house with a visible number is vital when an emergency strikes, says Brousseau, the head of the transition board’s street naming and numbering team.
Last May, his small team was given the unenviable task of eliminating the duplicated street names that were sprinkled throughout the region’s soon-to-be joined 12 municipalities. Town hall meetings had to be held, local historians consulted — affected residents were generally irked.
Time was of the essence, but months slid by.
The massive job was prompted particularly by emergency service workers who insisted duplicated street names had to be sorted out before Ottawa’s new 911 system was introduced. The streamlined system — called PERS, for Public Emergency Reporting Service — will automatically list a caller’s locality as Ottawa. Right now, the old municipal designators are still in the 911 system to keep it operating smoothly.
But reassigning new street names turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg for the team. Decades of lax municipal bylaws had also produced hundreds of cumbersome and wonky street names and confusing, non-sequential numbering systems.
Front-line emergency service workers, and even Canada Post, have been complaining about the region’s urban maze for years, but it took amalgamation to finally muster the will to clean it up.
And correcting it meant that a major overhaul was in order. Public safety had to become the driving force.
The result is a proposed bylaw that would set in stone strict guidelines for naming and numbering streets in the future.
Guidelines that specify rules including how far a street number can be from the road and that a street name must be short and simple. Naming streets has often been a whimsical, random act by developers, politicians and city staff. Brousseau wants this aspect of urban planning to become an exact science.
Also included in the bylaw will be 159 streets that had to be renamed, including five in Centretown — Hill, Derby, Mill, Elizabeth and Duke.
The team’s recommendations are still being reviewed at the committee level, but could reach council by March. If accepted, affected residents will be given half a year to get used to their new street names before they officially change.
But sentimental attachments to street names, not safety, could delay or even derail the plans.
Mayor Bob Chiarelli has already voiced his opposition to changing Ottawa’s duplicated street names. “People don’t want to change their street names and they don’t have to. I find it strange that we have a conservative board doing social engineering,” he said last month.
Social engineering?
Tell that to a 911 dispatcher or a police officer whose job it is to quickly respond to an S.O.S.
When an emergency happens minutes and seconds count, your street name shouldn’t stand in the way.