Ottawa streets will take on a new look once new street furniture is installed.
Brand new bus shelters, garbage cans and benches will soon be installed on downtown Ottawa streets to replace the current fixtures, described at a recent public consultation as, “ugly and useless.”
And it won’t cost the city a dime.
The four street furniture contracts that the city currently maintains – bus shelters, benches, garbage cans and bike racks – are each held by a different company. Each company’s design is different, creating a streetscape that Mayor Larry O’Brien has called “mish-mashed and chaotic.”
The new plan would see these four contracts amalgamated into one large agreement.
“It wouldn’t cost the taxpayer anything,” says Lee Ann Snedden, the project manager. The winning contractor will purchase, manufacture, and install the new street furniture. The contractor will sell advertising space on the fixtures and the city will receive a percentage of the revenue. Snedden says this makes the 20-year project not only zero-cost, but profitable as well.
The planning and environment committee is in the research stage of the project and are consulting local organizations, businesses and the general public to decide what improvements should be made.
At a recent consultation at city hall, residents made various requests.
Majed Mattar, a teacher at Canterbury High School, wants to see downtown parking meters replaced by a more visually-appealing pay-and-display system. John Arnold represented Heritage Ottawa, a non-profit organization wishing “to preserve the built heritage in the city,” he says.
Others advocate general accessibility, appealing cityscapes and the accommodation of bicycles on city streets.
Consultations will end in December, and the city will begin accepting bids for the contract that will be awarded in August 2009.
The city plans to start having new street furniture installed in July 2010.
“There are many other projects like this,” Snedden said. City council has researched similar proposals in Chicago, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary and Toronto.
The project in Toronto was approved in June and the street furniture installation has already begun, with the contract being awarded to Astral Outdoor Media.
A representative from Astral attended the Ottawa public consultations. Referring to the Toronto contract, David MacDonald says that “all the big players were there” competing against his company. Astral won, he says, because they proposed to have fewer ads.
“Instead of having a lot of smaller ads that clutter the streetscape, we focused on larger ads in bus shelters as well as on info panels,” says MacDonald. “From the city’s perspective, they may make slightly less [revenue], but they wanted less clutter and for the advertising to look cleaner.”
Ottawa is slightly different, he says, because of the concentration of local businesses. The winning contractor should classify the ads as national or local, says MacDonald, and offer local businesses a discount. This requirement would be outlined in the city’s contract.
Small businesses should not feel financially limited for their advertising opportunities, MacDonald said. “They don’t need to advertise on a postage stamp-sized ad panel that’s unlit and at the bottom of a garbage can,” he says.
MacDonald is planning to attend all the consultation meetings to “see what some of the issues are from different groups,” he said. “You can make small design changes up front to address some of the things people are looking for.”
The city’s public opinion research is ongoing and O’Brien recently published a letter encouraging residents to complete a survey on the city’s website. He writes that it’s “an exciting time to get involved and have a real impact on how Ottawa will look for generations to come.”