John Sewell notes, Ottawa speech, June 4, 2002.
Alta Vista Transportation Corridor
1. Thanks for having me. Let me say right off the top that when I toured the Alta Vista corridor six weeks ago I was appalled that in this day and age your city council would ever think that a roadway in this area would solve any problems. It’s the worst thing that could ever be done. Putting an LRT in its place would be a good step in the right direction, and represents imaginative thinking. I congratulate you for trying to cast the debate into the mainstream of how people think today about movement within cities, and for proposing a sensible solution.
2. When I began to ruminate further on this corridor, I turned to corridors in the mind, corridors described by W. B. Sebald in his extraordinary work, the one published just before his most unfortunate death several months ago in a automobile collision. If you haven’t discovered the deeply nostalgic and forboding world of Sebald’s early 20th century with the Holocaust’s terror looming ahead or glaring behind, I urge you to do so soon.
The book I’m referring to is Austerlitz, a work of fiction which recounts the author’s meetings with Austerlitz in various locales in Europe as the 20th century’s impacts unravel. The author says he had met Austerlitz in the city of Liege, in the Café des Esperances, where `just as our best laid plans, said Austerlitz, as I still remember, always turn into the exact opposite when they are put into practice’ and Austerlitz then goes into a long description of the Palace of Justice in Brussels, which contains `corridors and stairways leading nowhere’, and he wandered `on and down the corridors’ and came to other passageways, `branching off from the main corridors.’
3. How extraordinary, these corridors one can’t make sense of. They are surely the same corridors described in The Castle by Franz Kakfa, the nightmare world where corridors provide no solutions.
In Ottawa, when one thinks corridors, one mostly thinks of corridors of power, the places where the political deals are made, in the belly of the Langvin Block, or the Chateau or Parliament Hill. At the same time, Ottawa’s urban space is dominated by the endless transportation corridors, power corridors which define the city to its detriment. The primary corridors are for cars. The other and better means of transportation have been forced into corridors of their own - corridors for buses, for light rail, for pedestrians when they should be part of normal streets. One walks downtown mostly at one’s peril since most streets are corridors for cars. They are unpleasant, noisy, foul air, dangerous, and as we know even the drivers don’t like them since they are never wide enough for them, there aren’t enough of them.
The corridor here is the key land use planning element. I thought the quote of your chief planner Ned Lathrop in the Ottawa Citizen on May 2 was telling. The Citizen noted that Mr. Lathrop was `usually imperturbable’ but on this occasion he was upset because some councillors didn’t want to participate in a study of a ring road corridor. `We have to look ahead and preserve the corridors’ he said. Exactly – that’s what planning is about here. He understands his role.
4. The corridor is an old planning concept for Ottawa. This corridor, Alta Vista, has been in municipal planning documents since 1966. That’s 36 years ago. One could argue that it’s so old as an idea that age has bestowed truth upon it, but I think it’s outmoded, an idea that’s in the way. It may be more helpful to declare it a `heritage’ idea that should not be desecrated by implementation. Better just to designate it and keep the paper generated by this weird idea in a library of rare books.
5. This corridor idea is mostly fiction, although not nearly as compelling as Sebald. I was looking at the Environmental Assessment Study bulletin. It talks about something called a `transportation deficiency’ in the south east sector, and says `deficiencies in the south east sector transportation system have continued to escalate.’ You can almost feel the pressure, like a toothache caused by a cavity.
Have you ever seen a transportation surplus, where a consultant says – we should close this corridor down because there’s not enough traffic on it? This isn’t part of the lexicon of those who worry about corridors, but occasionally there are seismic shifts which force the issue. I’m thinking of the earthquake in San Francisco 15 years ago that brought down sections of the Embarcadero Expressway, a corridor of some substance. That required a radical rethinking and the decision was made to take the whole thing down, to the great benefit of that part of the city. Until that point few had realized that the corridor was the biggest problem in the neighbourhood. The corridor wasn’t part of the solution, it was part of the problem.
And what will make the seismic shift here in Ottawa? How do you throw off the yokes of the corridor mentality in which there will be a `facility’ as they call it – we all know they mean a four lane high speed roadway but introducing that level of specificity breaches the fictional attitude of anyone worrying about environmental assessment, as no doubt would reference to a faraway place like Japan, maybe Kyoto, perhaps. How do we make it clear when they talk about roads dedicated to `High Occupancy Vehicles’ that maybe having three people in a car can hardly be called high occupancy?? Maybe a vehicle with three or four dozen people could be called high occupancy vehicle, although most people would refer to it as a bus, or an LRT.
I agree the better solution is to replace the roadway corridor with transit such as light rail. Thinking transit means thinking about a healthy and sustainable future for the city. It’s a far far better alternative. Yet for my money I’d delete the corridor and put the transit right on the main streets where it belongs. Transit should push cars off our streets, not the other way round.
I don’t believe that the corridor mentality will yield to reason. The powers that be have been wedded to corridors for decades, which is why Ottawa is overrun with them. Good streets serve many many functions and the presence of transit strengthens any important street, just as an abundance of pass-through traffic weakens it. This basic concept is not one that most traffic or land use planners are prepared to incorporate into their lexicon.
What’s needed are some new words which describe a new vision, one that describes a city in which there are overlays of activities, where people live and work in close enough proximity to create an urban intensity which generates empathy and excitement, where the balance is shifted in favour of transit, in favour of active multifaceted streets. I couldn’t pretend to know what those words or concepts are for Ottawa, but I’m sure they are things that your activity and interest will throw up. What I do know is that building more roads and expanding the city’s physical boundaries – the very rationale of the corridor mentality - will never lead to urban improvement. It will lead to inefficiency and entropy. They say that Toronto can now be described as Vienna surrounded by Los Angeles, and the same thing is quickly happening here.
The amalgamation that has taken place here will have the impact of reducing the influence of urban values (like mixed used, an intensity of uses, an active street life) and strengthening the hand of suburbanites who dislike urban intensity except when on European or New York holiday. That makes it harder to gain a foothold for the post-corridor vision of the city, but not impossible.
Maybe a start is to say that Ottawa will be a city with smart green boundaries, that it will grow up before it grows out, that it will create interesting and intensive streets rather than desolate corridors, that it believes in living rooms and not corridors. Transit is at the heart of such a vision.
I wish you well in your attempt to dig Ottawa out of its 1960’s mentality and to put the corridor concept to rest. I hope you can design this city for living, not for the ceaseless search for happiness on the corridors of the past.