The city’s vision of maintaining Preston Street as a “traditional main street” is a priority in the city’s development plan for the Preston-Carling area, area residents were told at an open house last week. A few days later, at a second open house, residents considered three design options for the Gladstone Avenue area.
Both meetings were intended to inform residents about the city’s 20-year development vision for the two areas and are a continuation of plans first laid out by the city in 1994.
The new plans focus the most intense development along the major transit corridors such as Carling Avenue.
At the Preston-Carling meeting, city planner Randolph Wang said the Preston-Carling area “has become one of the major redevelopment nodes in the city of Ottawa and in the future is going to become the southwestern gateway of the city’s larger downtown.”
This has caused some concern among residents. Peter Trotscha said one aspect people haven’t taken into account is that the high-rise condos being built will more than double the population of the neighbourhood.
One of the ways the two development plans will alleviate some of this new pressure will be to redevelop the existing pedestrian and cycling routes, such as the expansion of the multi-use pathway running alongside the O-Train corridor.
The O-Train area is set to become one of the most developed areas in both districts.
Wang said plans for the expansion have been set for 2015 when a second pathway will be created on the other side of the tracks with a pedestrian bridge connecting the two sides up in the Gladstone area.
Kathy Kennedy, chair of the planning and development committee for the Civic Hospital Neighbourhood Association, said at the Gladstone meeting that the city needs to be more serious in making the roads safer for cyclists.
“We have more and more commuter traffic going through our neighbourhoods and so the identified cycling routes are becoming more dangerous.”
The planned improvement to Carling Avenue is intended to address this concern.
Ron Clarke, manager of planning with Delcan, a firm hired to help map out the new plan, said it keeps Carling as a major arterial route but also adds wider sidewalks and a segregated bike track. The bike track will be on the sidewalk to create a tangible barrier between cyclists and vehicles.
“It could be on-road, painted asphalt lanes, but seriously, the city’s really strongly leaning away from that because you get so much of a wider spectrum of cyclists: children, seniors, cycling at night, so let’s hope it goes that way,” he said.
At the Gladstone meeting, option one was the most preferred of the three. However, a criticism of that option is that it creates a road extending Oak Street down to Laurel Street in the Hintonburg area via an O-Train overpass.
Trotscha said the road is a bad idea because of the high numbers of children who use Plouffe Park.
“It’s a child magnet, there are summer programs that attract kids, as well as winter programs, and Oak Street is always crawling with kids. To make that a thoroughfare across the O-Train tracks strikes me as being unfriendly to children.”
Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes said one of the reasons option one is preferred is because it’s the most protective of the neighbourhood between Somerset Street and Gladstone Avenue, which the Oak Street extension will cut through.
“The community has agreed to a lot of intensification on Scott and a lot of intensification at Carling in order to protect this low-rise residential so that we maintain families here,” she said.
The plan also creates a new park between Oak and Balsam streets, across from Plouffe Park. Holmes said that “to be able to connect those two parks is really quite important. So we don’t want some major road separating those two parks.”
She said a good and helpful alternative to the Oak Street extension would be to turn it into a pedestrian path.
The project started again two years ago, splitting into three plans focusing on developing the areas surrounding each station.
The Gladstone Station District Community Design Plan (Gladstone CDP) is for the areas between Somerset Street West and Highway 417 and between Breezehill Avenue in the Civic Hospital area and Preston Street on the west side of Centretown.
CDPs are comprehensive documents created by city planners in consultation with neighbourhood residents laying out development plans for residential, commercial, retail, community and greenery development in the area over the next 20 years.
A public advisory group created in 2013 includes representatives from the Preston Street BIA, Dalhousie and Hintonburg Community Associations, BLISS (Believe in Livable Side Streets) and city councillors Diane Holmes and Katherine Hobbs.
The plans are currently slated to be presented to the city’s Planning Committee for approval in May and June 2014 respectively.