There is an artificial nuisance in downtown Ottawa which hurts businesses and stifles revitalization.
The evidence that one-way streets are business killers is overwhelming. It’s rare to see a thriving walk-in business on a one-way street.
Traffic moves up to twice as fast on one-way streets. Pedestrians seem to prefer the slower-moving traffic of two-way streets, and commerce depends on pedestrian traffic.
The thriving business communities in downtown Ottawa are all located along our few remaining two-way streets; Elgin, Somerset, Bank, or Preston streets trump Metcalfe or O’Connor any day.
While two-way status does not necessarily guarantee thriving commerce, as evidenced by a major thoroughfare like Bronson Avenue, the reverse seems to be true.
Vancouver, Regina and Hamilton are just some of the more than 100 North American cities that are reconverting to two-way streets.
One needn’t look far to find testimonials from people across the continent who have seen two-way conversions achieve levels of business growth and prosperity that years of financial investment failed to accomplish.
Characteristically, the City of Ottawa is failing to learn from the experiences of others.
One-way streets are just one of many urban-planning decisions made in the 1950s which keep Ottawans living in the past. That decade saw the Ottawa Transportation Commission tear up a city-wide network of streetcar tracks and implement an official policy of urban sprawl.
Those were the days when the automobile was king and the Cold War was in full swing. City planners wanted to help car commuters escape to their homes in the suburbs as quickly as possible when they finished work. Ottawa’s downtown streets became a grid of de facto mini-freeways. Traffic lights could be synchronized, and the downtown core could be evacuated efficiently every evening at five, or in the event of a nuclear attack.
The book Making a Capital by Jeff Keshen and Nicole St-Onge describes how urban sprawl was considered desirable by city planners. After all, it would be harder for the Soviets to wipe us off the map if we were spread out across half the province.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to have told our current city council that the Cold War is over. Maybe that’s because few people who were born since it ended bother to vote in municipal elections.
Meanwhile, fewer businesses means a less vibrant downtown, which translates into less revenue coming into the city. Tourists flock to city centres. It is doubtful anyone flies in from Hong Kong to take a sight-seeing tour of Orleans or Kanata.
The only ostensible advantage to one-way streets was allowing for more and faster car traffic. When one-way streets were implemented, traffic sped up so much that residents in most downtown areas fought long and hard to have so-called “traffic calming” measures installed. Now cars manoeuvre slowly over and around artificial obstacles like speed bumps which were designed to undo some of the harm done by one-way conversions, but which fail to bring back the advantages of the two-way street.
In this day and age, environmental concerns weigh more heavily than fears of a Soviet nuclear attack. Urban revitalization and intensification are often talked about in municipal politics, But in Ottawa, the visionaries at city hall cling stubbornly to their 1950s-era urban planning and Ottawa businesses are paying the price.
Charlie Taylor ran for mayor of Ottawa in the 2010 municipal election.