By Stephanie Myles
Centretown businesses want the city to consider burying power lines and increasing parking as part of the upcoming Bank Street renovations.
At a meeting earlier this month, community leaders, business associations and the city’s project team discussed their visions for Bank Street after construction is completed from Lansdowne Park to Wellington Street.
“There were a lot of things talked about as far as how to increase pedestrian flow, how to decrease traffic, how to make it more beautiful,” says Tom Fairfield, who represented the Bank Street Tommy & Lefebvre store at the meeting.
Fairfield says businesses want the city to bury power lines to create more space on the sidewalk.
“Getting power lines buried seemed to be a major concern,” he says. “Everybody wants power lines buried.”
But Richard Holder, the project manager for the city, says it is too early to assess the feasibility of the idea.
“It would be expensive,” he says. “We will look at alternatives as we go through the course of this preliminary design.”
The city will use the latest suggestions to guide the new design and present it at an open house on April 5, says Phil Landry, a member of the project team.
Fairfield says parking is another major concern along this section of Bank Street. He says shop owners want to create more parking by eliminating rush-hour no-parking zones, even though this would slow traffic.
“There seemed to be consensus to have parking along the street all the time,” he says. “So that sort of goes against having efficient vehicular traffic flow.”
Shop owners might not get their wish, says David Gladstone, a Centretown resident and member of the city’s pedestrian and traffic advisory committee.
“There will probably … be a fair bit of resistance to anything that is perceived as constricting the traffic flow on Bank Street (north of) the Queensway,” he says, “so there will probably be an interesting give-and-take process.”
Gladstone says one of his priorities is to make it easier to travel along Bank Street. He says the city should encourage people to use the bus like a shuttle from one end to the other, or even create a bus route only for Bank Street.
“You can do it now but … you have to be a pretty seasoned user of the buses on Bank Street to know where to go,” says Gladstone. “If you’re at Bank and Laurier, nothing tells you what bus will take you into the Glebe.”
Landry says the suggestions from the meeting gave the city’s project team a good sense of community priorities.
“There weren’t many issues that were brought up that weren’t expected to be brought up,” says Holder.
While businesses and residents are optimistic about the reconstruction, Fairfield says they are also realistic.
“Although we’d like to have all these things, the reality is you can only do so much with that much space,” he says.