So the City of Ottawa will not widen the heavily congested Airport Parkway for another four years. Or, eight years, say planners. Or, 10 years.
In this feckless city, you never know. There is no urgency about anything – and certainly not about addressing this critical, clogged artery running between downtown and the airport.
It doesn’t matter that the parkway is bumper-to-bumper in rush hour, with commuters to the suburbs and travellers to the airport. It’s all about money. There isn’t enough for this kind of project, it seems. What’s delicious here is that the widening had been anticipated as part of the 2016 budget.
The change escaped the attention of Coun. Diane Deans, whose ward includes the airport, who says that city staff did not inform her it had been deferred.
“A well-guarded secret,” she complains.
Here, then, is why Ottawa is a sleepy place – shoddy planning, administrative lassitude, somnolent politicians. It explains a city that is the way it is. For its lack of ambition and absence of imagination, Ottawa is the worst capital in the G7. It is unable to get anything done very quickly, whether repairing a ceremonial thoroughfare like Sussex Drive or building light rail, which will arrive decades after other cities.
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It took years longer and cost much more than planned to build a footbridge over the Airport Parkway, now offering the best view of the mess below. Of course, the parkway would matter less if there were light rail going to the airport, but that’s not happening anytime soon. The city’s motto should be “Mañana.”
For mediocrity, there’s Lansdowne Park. After seductive promises and breathless claims from developers and politicians, we got a (nice) stadium, shops, restaurants and condos, with a park and a wading pool as consolation. It replaces a sea of cracked asphalt and a crumbling stadium, and for contented Ottawans, that’s fine. But it’s just not interesting, let alone innovative.
And we squandered a once-in-a-century chance to remake Ottawa’s image, for example to do for our city what the Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao, Spain.
But this is Ottawa. It is congenitally conservative. If New York is said to be a town without foreplay, Ottawa is a town without climax. Not much ever happens, and when something does, the earth doesn’t move. The big ideas remaking cities – renewed waterfronts, recovered green space, edgy architecture, environmental innovation, seamless public transit – happen somewhere else.
Oh, let’s not be too unfair. Ottawa has better shopping than it did, even if Holt Renfrew has left town. Light rail is coming, though it won’t stop in Confederation Square. The brutalist National Arts Centre is getting a new glass façade, and will no longer look like a Stalinist detention centre.
But Ottawa is more motion than progress. It still has no new central library. It cannot make people use the Sparks Street Mall, now celebrating 50 years of failure. It cannot stop Rideau Street from looking a like tumble-weed main street in a mining town. It cannot produce better, more reasonable restaurants.
This is not the municipality’s fault alone; the federal government (particularly the Conservatives, who loathed Ottawa) has contributed to creating a soulless city.
Now, though, the Liberals bring new opportunity. In the tireless Catherine McKenna, the city has a new voice in cabinet. She, as well as Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and her gifted parliamentary secretary, Randy Boissonnault, have an opportunity to lead a civic conversation on reimagining Ottawa as a modern, progressive capital, a repository of history and culture, a reflection of our achievements and dreams as a nation.
This means building no more ugly federal office towers, re-examining the Zibi development (which some local aboriginal groups oppose), creating a new science museum and national portrait gallery, as well as finding new purpose for the empty Government Conference Centre and the Canada and the World Pavilion.
It means thinking boldly about the shores of the Ottawa River, once the window on our wilderness, and the Rideau Canal, too.
This is 2016. As the world turns, Ottawa stands still, somewhere between not yet and not ever.
In this feckless city, you never know. There is no urgency about anything – and certainly not about addressing this critical, clogged artery running between downtown and the airport.
It doesn’t matter that the parkway is bumper-to-bumper in rush hour, with commuters to the suburbs and travellers to the airport. It’s all about money. There isn’t enough for this kind of project, it seems. What’s delicious here is that the widening had been anticipated as part of the 2016 budget.
The change escaped the attention of Coun. Diane Deans, whose ward includes the airport, who says that city staff did not inform her it had been deferred.
“A well-guarded secret,” she complains.
Here, then, is why Ottawa is a sleepy place – shoddy planning, administrative lassitude, somnolent politicians. It explains a city that is the way it is. For its lack of ambition and absence of imagination, Ottawa is the worst capital in the G7. It is unable to get anything done very quickly, whether repairing a ceremonial thoroughfare like Sussex Drive or building light rail, which will arrive decades after other cities.
Related
It took years longer and cost much more than planned to build a footbridge over the Airport Parkway, now offering the best view of the mess below. Of course, the parkway would matter less if there were light rail going to the airport, but that’s not happening anytime soon. The city’s motto should be “Mañana.”
For mediocrity, there’s Lansdowne Park. After seductive promises and breathless claims from developers and politicians, we got a (nice) stadium, shops, restaurants and condos, with a park and a wading pool as consolation. It replaces a sea of cracked asphalt and a crumbling stadium, and for contented Ottawans, that’s fine. But it’s just not interesting, let alone innovative.
And we squandered a once-in-a-century chance to remake Ottawa’s image, for example to do for our city what the Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao, Spain.
But this is Ottawa. It is congenitally conservative. If New York is said to be a town without foreplay, Ottawa is a town without climax. Not much ever happens, and when something does, the earth doesn’t move. The big ideas remaking cities – renewed waterfronts, recovered green space, edgy architecture, environmental innovation, seamless public transit – happen somewhere else.
Oh, let’s not be too unfair. Ottawa has better shopping than it did, even if Holt Renfrew has left town. Light rail is coming, though it won’t stop in Confederation Square. The brutalist National Arts Centre is getting a new glass façade, and will no longer look like a Stalinist detention centre.
But Ottawa is more motion than progress. It still has no new central library. It cannot make people use the Sparks Street Mall, now celebrating 50 years of failure. It cannot stop Rideau Street from looking a like tumble-weed main street in a mining town. It cannot produce better, more reasonable restaurants.
This is not the municipality’s fault alone; the federal government (particularly the Conservatives, who loathed Ottawa) has contributed to creating a soulless city.
Now, though, the Liberals bring new opportunity. In the tireless Catherine McKenna, the city has a new voice in cabinet. She, as well as Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly and her gifted parliamentary secretary, Randy Boissonnault, have an opportunity to lead a civic conversation on reimagining Ottawa as a modern, progressive capital, a repository of history and culture, a reflection of our achievements and dreams as a nation.
This means building no more ugly federal office towers, re-examining the Zibi development (which some local aboriginal groups oppose), creating a new science museum and national portrait gallery, as well as finding new purpose for the empty Government Conference Centre and the Canada and the World Pavilion.
It means thinking boldly about the shores of the Ottawa River, once the window on our wilderness, and the Rideau Canal, too.
This is 2016. As the world turns, Ottawa stands still, somewhere between not yet and not ever.
Randall Denley
