BOOTH BRIDGE PLAN PUTS KINK IN ZIBI’S CHAIN
Development ‘born on a bike’ won’t have dedicated lanes along main entry
The people behind the billiondollar redevelopment of the Domtar industrial site on the Ottawa River are not at all happy with Ottawa’s decision to make the area hard to reach by bicycle.
Windmill Developments bills its Zibi project as an attempt to build the “world’s most sustainable community.” The plan is to turn Domtar’s defunct mills on Chaudière and Albert islands into a commercial and condo neighbourhood, opening up access to the long-enclosed waterways and threading the whole area through with pedestrian and bike routes.
The main way in and out will be Booth Street, which the city has decided will have no bike lanes, let alone separated bike tracks, because — follow this if you can — the city’s planners decided it’ll be safer to have cyclists leapfrogging in the road with buses and trucks there, contrary to its own policies. This is on a bridge over the new light-rail line the city is building from scratch.
“It doesn’t help us. We would still have a good connection in that the multi-use pathways on both sides of the river will get you right into our development, but it does create a series of roundabout ways for people,” says Rodney Wilts, a Windmill partner. The big problems are the crummy access it’ll create to and from a major transit hub and — looking at the bigger picture — the poor routes for cyclists trying to pass through the area.
The Zibi development “was born on a bike,” Wilts says. Windmill’s office is on Wellington Street West; Wilts commutes by bicycle and was riding across the islands on Booth Street years ago when the thought of redeveloping the Domtar property began glimmering in his head.
“It should be the best (bike) connection between downtown Gatineau and downtown Ottawa. It’s flat, it’s historic, you’ve got amazing views on either side,” he says.
The old bridges across the islands make things tricky, but Windmill has devised a plan for buffered bike lanes on Booth Street and Rue Eddy, its continuation on the Quebec side of the border, to get in and out of the Zibi district. The hard part will be getting to those bike lanes if the city’s plan sticks.
“My immediate response was ‘Oh my goodness, there’s no bike connection.’ We’re putting in bike lanes and the bike lanes are going to die. So this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Wilts says.
The constant complaint road cyclists make about biking in Ottawa is its many good cycling routes are poorly connected — you can have a great pathway here and a safe bike lane there, but in between is a stretch of narrow busy road nobody feels safe on. I wrote earlier this week, based on internal city documents, planners know that’s exactly what they’re building on the Booth Street bridge, but decided to do it anyway.
“Thinking about the National Capital Region as a whole — what does it do for someone who’s shopping on Rue Eddy and wants to make it up to Preston Street or working at Terasses de la Chaudière, but living in Ottawa or near the LRT and saying ‘I’d like to bike the last little bit?’” Wilts asks. “Those are the things that start falling apart.”
Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney, who represents the area, agrees. “We just have to make sure that all those pieces fit together and we’re building a community,” she says.
The good news is she met Mayor Jim Watson’s staff Thursday and believes there’s hope for the new Booth Street bridge.
“The initial aspect of the meeting was to talk about all the reasons why it couldn’t be done,” she says. “As we got into the details a bit, I think they started to see some of the possibilities.”
Another city hall meeting is scheduled next week with transportation planners, she says.
The new Booth Street bridge is already under construction, which complicates things. A wider bridge would have accommodated bikes more easily.
“We can’t change the structure of the bridge today, so some opportunity is lost, but there are opportunities that remain that we can take advantage of,” McKenney says.