Less Car

Category: Orleans

  • Jeanne d’Arc Blvd Pedestrian Crossing

    Jeanne d’Arc Blvd Pedestrian Crossing

    Creating a new pedestrian crossing to get across a certain problematic section of Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard is something I’ve been mulling over and wanting to talk about for literal months.

    My version of this story contains some aspects of government bureaucracy, car-friendly transportation rules, and common-sense safety and accessibility changes. The exact spot I’m describing today is on Jeanne d’Arc, between the intersection of Vineyard/Fortune and Voyageur/Vorlage (names in the suburbs get weird where the same road gets multiple names even though sections of the road are less than a kilometre long.

    Even from the level of detail of this first map, keen-eyed observers can see there is something going on here, a pair of green lines that seem to match up almost perfect, separated by a big ol’ road. This is basically the exact spot that served as my measurement location for the first post on this blog: Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard North – Road Layout Update. This specific spot is also home to of the most obvious places for new pedestrian infrastructure in this whole neighbourhood.

    Zooming In

    Getting a little closer to this ‘intersection’, you can clearly see that an effort was made here to connect the path network, but maybe someone lost an argument, or it was decided that traffic being slowed or stopped one extra time here if someone wanted to cross was unacceptable.

    Personally, in the 5 years I’ve lived in this neighbourhood, I have crossed this road at this point probably a dozen times. I’ve done it with a stroller, I’ve done it with a toboggan (to a community event, no less). It’s frankly embarrassing that the path system is so wholly broken by this one disconnect that it has probably prevented hundreds, if not thousands, of trips that could be walked but were instead driven.

    To those not familiar with the area, in the 300 m or so around this spot, there are two schools, a fire station, a basketball court (in dire need of a renewal, by the way), 2 soccer fields, a baseball diamond, a boarded hockey rink, a community shopping plaza (micro strip mall, basically), several large green spaces, parks and playgrounds, and some very nice active transportation paths that form a nice network. These amenities would all unilaterally become more accessible if this crossing were opened up with a controlled signal or any kind of pedestrian infrastructure.

    The Bureaucracy

    Now, for those of you thinking “Rob, why don’t you ask your local municipal representative about this”. It seems like a pretty obvious safety and accessibility win to open up this crossing, traffic impact would probably be minimal, and commuters might see their trips slowed by a few seconds 1-2 times a week at most.

    I want to preface what I say next by saying that I don’t begrudge the local municipal staff, councillors, or really anybody involved locally for not rocking the boat for this. Incremental change like this, whether you agree it is a good idea or not, has become somewhat radical, especially if it makes things technically harder for cars.

    Tangent: The Roundabout

    However, another thing I’ll say before I talk about the politics of this is that a BIG discussion going on in the community right now, happened a little over 200 m away from this spot, is the addition of a roundabout near the local school, designed to help the buses visiting the soon-to-be-completed Jeanne d’Arc LRT station turn around once they’ve completed their routes.

    This has become a huge discussion point because parents of the children at this school are concerned about safety at this intersection, and many view buses and this roundabout as dangerous for kids getting to school. I think this is pretty silly, the roundabout is very well considered, and will itself have a controlled pedestrian signal and a crossing guard. The design is almost certainly safer for students, given the lower vehicle speeds to navigate the intersection and the only result of these changes will be less car traffic through this intersection, not more.

    Anyhow, this tangent is to add nearby context to the discussion, now back to the bureaucracy.

    Now, when I reached out to my councillor to ask about this spot and the possibility of adding a crossing, I wasn’t necessarily expecting smooth sailing and that this would happen within a month or two. Even I am not that naive. However, I didn’t expect the actual response I got, which I’ll paraphrase here.

    The Argument for Status Quo

    I was told that provincial regulations dictated that a pedestrian crossing (PXO is the acronym they used, so I’ll borrow that here) could not be placed less than 200 m away from another signalized intersection. The other intersection I mentioned (with Voyageur/Vorlage) is about 160 m from the spot I’d propose makes the most sense for a PXO. I’ll note that this 200 m number is totally arbitrary, and I can think of PLENTY of exceptions to it in Ottawa that were surely based on some kind of reasoning that could be applied here. Usually, the reasoning would involve safety or some kind of exceptional road design.

    The argument was made (by traffic engineers and city staff, relayed to me by the councillor’s office) that because the road curves at this spot, and the speed limit along this stretch is relatively high at 60 kph, having motorists potentially need to stop for this PXO signal is dangerous. Personally, I would argue that if it is dangerous having pedestrians cross because of the speed and the design of the road, perhaps the speed limit shouldn’t be 60, since you are driving between an elementary school and a fire station.

    More Road Design Considerations

    Another factor to consider is that due to upcoming changes to the road nearby, like the roundabout going in, there is already ongoing discussion about the speed limit along this whole stretch being reduced to 40 kph. This is because over a relatively short stretch, passing several schools, the road already jumps from speed limits of 40 and 60 several times, and a new speed camera a couple of blocks further east on this road has been giving massive numbers of tickets to drivers in the community. This isn’t surprising, because the road itself is absolutely encouraging you to go faster than this with its design, wide lanes and clear sight lines.

    The road will also bottleneck down to 1 lane on either end once the roundabout goes in, so I would make the argument now is a perfect time to bite the bullet and say that this road should just be 1 lane at 40 kph for the whole length in this section. At that point, not only would a PXO be more reasonable, having big flashing lights for motorists would be less necessary (though I would argue still a good idea), and travel distance in traffic would be reduced by half for pedestrians (only needing to cross two lanes instead of four).

    This is About Tradeoffs

    Now, before concluding this piece, I’d like to return to the provincial regulation requiring 200 metres between signalized intersections to add a PXO. With a distance to the nearest intersection in this case of about 160 m, here is what traffic engineers are suggesting when a pedestrian approaches this spot from either direction with a hypothetical crossing. Rather than having motorists slow down or stop for a few seconds occasionally to let a pedestrian or cyclist continue their walk along a path, it is suggested that they should have to walk at least 320 m (160 m there and 160 m more back) in order to allow for traffic flow. They are also saying that this should still be the case even if the detoured walk is a total of nearly 400 m. It’s no surprise at all to me that unless I am with my young family doing this on foot, I sometimes just walk across the road (dangerously!).

    One last point to wrap up this logical garden path: there is already a roundabout going in at one of the two nearby intersections. The logic for that roundabout going in is that buses accessing the nearby LRT station need to be able to turn around. However, I would make the argument that if all the described changes take place (40 kph limit, reduction to one lane, adding a PXO crossing), having a roundabout replace the signalized intersection at Jeanne d’Arc and Voyageur/Vorlage as well makes perfect sense.

    This intersection could also have a pedestrian crossing with lights like at the other roundabout, and given this change in traffic pattern, its entirely possible that traffic flow through the area on an average basis actually moves a little better, with less likelihood of starting and stopping almost all of the time. And when there is a higher likelihood of interactions between pedestrians and motorists at these places (rush hour and around the start/end of the school day), should we not be prioritizing the safety of our children anyhow? These intersections are already patrolled by crossing guards, surely these changes would only make their job easier.

    In Summary

    To wrap up, I have a lot to say about this set of upgrades to the road design of this stretch of Jeanne d’Arc Blvd. I think it is doable in a fairly short time frame and without too much expense, and the resulting road design is not only fairer and more equitable, but it’s safer and requires less upkeep and maintenance.

  • Bike Trip to the Library – July 17, 2024

    Bike Trip to the Library – July 17, 2024

    I’m wrapping up 4 weeks of parental leave from work (going back Monday), and so for the last few month I have been spending all day every day with kids. Since I got the new bike (which can carry the older two on the back), the kids have been wanting to run errands and do things on the bike instead of the car (which I love to hear of course as I feel the same way). This means that I have been thinking a lot about bike routes to certain places I’ve only imagined actually getting to with kids on the bike.

    Getting to the Library

    The library is one of the places I aim to go to more often with my kids, the local library was one of my favorite places to be growing up, and it was especially nice when I could make it there on my own on the bike. In Calgary where I grew up, the library wasn’t particularly easy to get to on a bike, but it wasn’t far and I am very comfortable on a bike, so from an early age I just biked in traffic, and this was the late-90s, early 2000s, so bike infrastructure definitely wasn’t a thing.

    In setting out to do this, I got looking at maps to see that the most efficient several routes to get to the library were all just on the street. Some streets were less busy than others, but the stretch to get across the highway consists of two options, both of which are heavily under construction and each consist of 2-lane roads where you’re asked to ‘share the road’ single file.

    Crossing the highway

    I could only do that short stretch because I feel very comfortable taking the full lane, and because I’ve biked enough that I can travel about 30kph up the hill across the bridge to cross the highway. For those of you who don’t bike on the streets often, when you need to share the lane, every car behind you INSTANTLY feels the need to try to pass you at speed even if there is additional danger for them in doing that. This is obviously exacerbated by a larger speed difference between the speed limit and the speed of your bike, but even if I’m going 30 and the car traffic should be going 40, cars will typically exceed the speed limit temporarily just to get around you, sometimes a lot, because they won’t have to wait 30 seconds behind you.

    I’m happy to note this particular stretch across the highway on the two nearby bridges (Jeanne d’Arc and Orleans Blvds) are being improved, and so both are partly under construction right now. There will be a pair of multi-use paths going in to cross these two bridges, which I expect will greatly improve the comfort and safety of getting across the highway. It has been under construction for over a year now, and cycling even alone hasn’t felt particularly safe for me at any point during that time, nor did it feel safe at any time before construction began.

    Once we got across the highway, the road opens back up to 4 total lanes again, which for such a low volume route (with sections at both ends that bottleneck to 1 lane, by the way) basically means the outer two lanes function as bike lanes outside of the very short morning and afternoon rush (I’ve never witnessed this busy period to be honest, but there are people who swear traffic volume requires 2 lanes each way).

    The Rest of the Way

    Once I made it across the highway, I got some advice from a fellow bike parent that you could avoid some car traffic to do the last stretch of the route following basically back roads through the adjacent neighbourhoods. I had the map (below) in my head as an approximate route plan, but it basically involves winding through local streets and on to and off pathways. It’s kind of a maze but it does work, and with kids on the bike it does feel way safer than the alternative.

    When I tried to bike to the library on my own in preparation for this trip (imagine ‘trying’ a trip alone in a car to make sure it’s safe to take a family later 😢), I attempted to use the logical efficient route (and the one suggested for bikes by Google Maps) and essentially follow Orleans Blvd for the entire last half of the route. On the map that would basically be replacing the whole last section weaving through the community with just following the obvious straight line path across the highway all the way up the hill to the library. It’s actually a very simple route in a car where you’re not worrying about these things.

    Orleans Blvd

    Orleans Blvd has TONS of space for wider sidewalks and cycle tracks (see this post for an example of the space there is in this right-of-way), but in its current form, it’s a 4-lane road with a speed limit of 60, and it is designed for cars to feel totally comfortable going MUCH faster than that. Even on an ebike going full tilt without passengers on my test run, I was going low 30s kph and being passed in the other lane by cars going 60-70. Again, the road volume doesn’t require 2 lanes each way, so cars typically wouldn’t need to close pass you in your lane, but they certainly would try if it came to saving a few seconds and there was another car next to them. Going up a hill in traffic is the worst, because as I said before it all comes down to the speed difference, I think cycle tracks on this route would probably be the most beneficial because it will enable less confident riders to feel comfortable taking this route, where I wouldn’t recommend its use today at all.

    The one nice thing about the route we were required to take to feel safe (not to say this wouldn’t be possible if there was safe bike infrastructure) is that while taking back roads through the neighbourhood, we passed by at least 4-5 little parks and playgrounds, each of which the kids absolutely would have stopped and played at. On the way home, we did pick one of them to stop at, which really capped off the experience for the kiddos.

    Conclusions

    In summary, I think this ride is absolutely doable if you feel up for being hassled by cars as you cross the highway (it is literally 1-2 blocks of the whole trip), but with some consideration of this kind of bike traffic, this route could be SO MUCH BETTER. Given traffic volumes in the area, having this bridge be one lane is not a big deal (it’s been like this for a year!), and it would enable so many more people to get around outside of their cars.

  • Vineyard / Voyageur Community Bus Loop

    Vineyard / Voyageur Community Bus Loop

    I’m a big fan of efficient, convenient, and frequent bus routes that access or connect common amenities. Growing up in Calgary, I made frequent use of what that city calls ‘community shuttles’, basically smaller buses that tend to run shorter closed loops in a community connecting riders to transit hubs or nearby amenities.

    A Tangent on Community Shuttles

    From what I hear (and I did a fair bit of research on this), the community shuttle program has been difficult to maintain in Calgary, but part of this is because ridership on some of these smaller routes is precarious, so some are being converted to full big bus routes (a good problem to have, I guess), whereas some are underused and are being cancelled in favour of an attempt at an on-demand service where you call or schedule a pickup, which will obviously take more work and probably longer overall unless your timing is known in advance and you’re a good planner.

    The community shuttles still being used today are vehicles reminiscent of something like an airport shuttle, I did source a few reference pictures from a very helpful forum website, the Canadian Public Transit Discussion Board (because there is a niche for absolutely everything) or CPTDB, and some very helpful Reddit users on r/Calgary.

    Latest design of community shuttles
    Interior of community shuttles (older model)

    A Community Shuttle Streetcar?

    Now, with this tool at hand, we can start to look at the possibility raised by having a vehicle like this in the OC Transpo fleet. Personally, I find accessing the businesses and amenities across the highway from my neighbourhood to be challenging outside of a car at the BEST of times. Sure, if you need to, you can do it, but if you already have a car, and ESPECIALLY if you are bringing family (kids, mostly) or multiple people, best case scenario now you’re walking a long way through infrastructure that is signalling that you’re sort of a nuisance that must be legally accommodated.

    Despite the fact that there is a complete set of bus stops and shelters within a few hundred feet of the Jeanne d’Arc highway overpass, the sidewalks and crossing infrastructure is currently bolted on to what the planners already considered a perfectly acceptable design for a car-centric area. Now, this is already under construction to be much better with the LRT stop opening here next year, but there’s a real community opportunity to make this a viable, multi-modal connection bridging the two sides of the highway with safe infrastructure, with these complete street designs diving all the way into the community on both sides rather than ending a few hundred feet down in either direction and dropping you back on to a 4-lane road with narrow sidewalks.

    Anyhow, along with that vision for the overpass, I think there is a great opportunity to draw people in and enable them to actually use reliable active and public transportation options, which is to run a set of local shuttles that take riders from the community (there is a clear and obvious loop I’ve highlighted below that would accommodate this, as an example). The loop has the shuttle cross the highway, loop around the roundabout at the far end, and then return and do the loop again.

    A shuttle like this could run every 12-15 minutes like at a resort or large theme park, and reliably bring patrons or staff to and from the many businesses running along the strip down St. Joseph. Combine this with frequent buses along or down St. Joseph itself and there’s an opportunity here to make this street a safe, walkable destination that isn’t just filled with mostly underused parking that on average take up way more space than the businesses they attempt to support.

    If you look at the map of this part of Orleans, it doesn’t take much creativity to start drawing our 5-6 other possible community shuttle routes that could run with a similar cadence, and make St. Joseph a destination like Westboro, Bank, or Elgin Street that people actually want to visit, as opposed to pulling up in a car to a specific shop, spending time buying something or eating there, and then driving away. And with linkages along these routes to the LRT, people can visit from other places in town or even from other cities without needing to rent a (VERY EXPENSIVE THESE DAYS) car.

    Final Thoughts

    I think the key to a program like this is to make the program affordable and incentivise people to actually use it. Maybe don’t charge on weekends for the shuttles for the first 3-6 months, and run them frequently throughout the day so you don’t even have to think about the schedule to go catch one. Get people used to thinking about it as a viable option, and worry less about a public good operating as a for-profit operation that needs to return on investment.

    The bus that currently runs what this route will become once the LRT opens, the 237, literally only runs 4 times a day during peak hours on weekdays. It’s used to get downtown workers to the current LRT during rush hour, but we can do so much better. Aside from this bus, anybody in the community wanting to take public transit needs to walk anywhere from a few hundred metres at least, up to over a kilometre just to get to the nearest ‘main road’ at Jeanne d’Arc.

  • Running Errands on a Cargo Bike – July 14, 2024

    Running Errands on a Cargo Bike – July 14, 2024

    I did something today that would have been very hard to do without the cargo ebike I got this spring (I’ll describe this bike more in a future post). This afternoon I did a couple of errands on the bike, which is better in almost every imaginable way than doing equivalent tasks would have been in a car. After dropping off a fairly large package (big enough I never could have attempted this with my standard hybrid bike) at Canada Post in the Shoppers at Jeanne d’Arc and Orleans Blvds, I took Orleans Blvd south up the hill, then made my way over to Canadian Tire for some pool chemicals.

    On the way there, I took Jeanne d’Arc to see the newly paved and painted intersection at Frank Bender on a bike. On the way, I tried to look at the sidewalks along Jeanne d’Arc leading up to that area. They look like they are pretty old, giving me some hope that if they do get prioritized for replacement in 2-5 years (or something) it may be possible to make better use of the Jeanne d’Arc right-of-way for active transport. I grew up on a bicycle so I feel quite comfortable on almost any road, but even talking to my parents in Calgary (in their 60s/70s) about how I’ve been biking more and advocating for an active transportation network in Ottawa last week, my parents mentioned that they don’t bike as much as they would when they were younger because of missing infrastructure links.

    My route to Canadian Tire.

    Anyhow, on the way back from Canadian Tire, I went straight through Frank Bender on to Belcourt Blvd using the newly paved connection I mentioned earlier, and I must say Belcourt is a dream cycling route, with almost no traffic since cars can’t get through. A few stop signs (including one that is totally redundant for bikes) are really the only things stopping bikes from cruising uninterrupted straight through the neighbourhood. The planners and folks who implemented this efficient community connection deserve a congrats! However, that route did just dump me out on to St. Joseph at the end, which is obviously less ideal for less experienced people. It would be cool if this kind of infrastructure had somewhat logical beginnings and destinations when they’re planned out, their disjointed nature makes them hard to use for less and more experienced people.

    My route home (shows walking because the cycling connection where Frank Bender turns in to Belcourt (white dot in the blue dots near where it says ORLEANS VILLAGE – CHATEAUNEUF) is so new I had to edit Google Maps today).

    All that said, I will celebrate progress. When I take routes like Jeanne d’Arc, Orleans Blvd, and St. Joseph Blvd, I can’t help but picture and imagine what they might look like if we took the climate, housing, and affordability crises deadly seriously and really committed like cities like Paris or Montreal to densification, a complete and less car-dependent transportation network, and allowing mixed-use zoning to make it easier to create complete neighbourhoods in a relatively compact space. I fully recognize it is MUCH easier to say those words in a vacuum than to implement any of those things while keeping a functional city running with a strapped budget, but I will keep dreaming about it.

  • Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard North – Road Layout Update

    Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard North – Road Layout Update

    My neighbourhood

    I live in a suburb of Ottawa called Orleans, and though the neighborhood is starting to work towards a modern understanding of good urban design, a lot of the transportation infrastructure in the community is based on 99% car traffic. There are affordances for other modes of transport in some places, but in many cases unless it is a brand-new change, these affordances are for leisure (like with most of the park paths), not transportation.

    Left: Current streetscape; Right: After the redesign.

    I have many qualms with the loopy, inefficient neighbourhood street layouts, and missing sidewalks, but I’ll save discussion of those for another time. Today, I want to talk about the main road granting access to my neighborhood, Jeanne d’Arc Boulevard.

    Jeanne d’Arc is about the least imaginative way I could imagine designing a road in the 80s, where I could imagine having trees and some green space alongside the road would be viewed as a vast improvement over the downtown core where trees would be few and far between, and grass would be a luxury.

    The Current Design

    Below, I’ve mocked up the average layout of the 32+ metre boulevard streetscape with a very cool tool called Streetmix. You can see the road has 4 lanes, plus extremely generous grassy areas on either side, followed by a <1.75m sidewalk at the very edge of the boulevard (Streetmix actually calls this ‘too narrow’ and throws up warnings when you put the sidewalk in).

    By the way, Streetmix also warns me that the 4m wide outer lanes of the road are considered far too wide. This boulevard was overbuilt at 14m wide for 4 lanes, presumably at a time when this was considered future-proofing for a time when it would just get busier and busier, something that has just never happened.

    Drivers who use this route to commute every morning at the absolute peak of traffic would probably tell you it gets backed up occasionally, but for the remaining 99% of the time you’re much more likely to see at MOST a handful of cars than anything resembling so much as a slowdown.

    On its own, this overbuilt road is underutilized, but this is true of many roads in many places all around North America. The true tragedy of this road in its current state is the missed opportunity to include other modes of transportation in its design.

    It’s clear from spending any amount of time on or around this road that cars are ABSOLUTELY the priority consideration of this road. Even though the road surface itself is in pretty desperate need of a resurfacing itself, the sidewalk is in even worse shape. Not only is it extremely narrow, but in a few places, every year overgrowth from adjacent bushes actively pushes users on to the grass. It’s not uncommon to see bikes on the sidewalk as well, since there is no safe way for less comfortable or experienced riders from sharing this already narrow space with anybody who walks here.

    A 32.2 m wide boulevard (all distances were measured using the measuring tool on Google Maps) is massive considering the traffic volume of all kinds here, and giving nearly half to cars (14 m), while having nearly 50% of the space dedicated to grass and trees, while all other road users are squished in to the outer <3.5 m (around 10-15% of the total road space) is frankly embarrassing.

    The embarrassment only gets worse when you find out that this road connects directly to a transportation hub with the LRT system opening in 2025, and buses come along this road at MOST every 10-15 minutes at peak times (all routes combined). With wide paths, multi-modal considerations, and a little creativity, we can rethink this road to not only accommodate a way larger variety of modes of transportation, but to carry a higher volume of actual people throughout the day, instead of just calculating for the most cars the road will ever see.

    The Redesign

    Below is a mockup of what Jeanne d’Arc could look like with a road design that offers multiple realistic options for travel. This is just one option, with all the added space that at this point can’t realistically be used for anything but this road, there is a LOT of flexibility.

    In this specific example layout, I’ve added an extra-wide sidewalk, added more trees and a bike lane in either direction. I have removed the extra car lane in each direction here as well, but there is space to keep it, although other changes to this road happening elsewhere mean that 1 lane at 40kph (instead of the current 2 lanes at 60kph) probably makes sense as the appropriate lane configuration.

    With this layout, the street is much safer (it is bordered by many parks and 2 schools in a relatively short stretch), and it is designed for travel at the safe speed of 40 kph instead of requiring annoying speed traps and red-light cameras to entrap drivers with big wide lanes. One other nice feature is that the road will be much quieter for houses backing on to it at 40 kph.

    Final Thoughts

    To wrap up this redesign, prioritizing safe transport, via multiple modes, and in a more sustainable way, seems like a pretty clear win for the community. At most, detractors could say that driving may get a few seconds slower, maybe 1-2 minutes longer to traverse the whole length of the several km section.

    Perhaps it is transparently a value judgment that these are my priorities, but the tradeoffs of designing a transportation system with redundancy and multiple good options and reducing suburban car dependency and sprawling overbuilt roadways are unquestionably positives compared to the alternative (what we have now in many cases).