Not all plan proposals contentious

The many proposals for Ottawa’s new official plan do include plenty of fairly uncontroversial things, too.

The city’s been working on high-density plans for the areas around the Transitway stations due to be converted to light rail, and intends to extend the work to stations at Pinecrest, South Keys and Riverside South’s core, so the city’s ready when developers come knocking. It wants to designate new main streets along sections of Ogilvie, Innes and Walkley roads and St. Laurent Boulevard.

Traffic engineers have long rated streets by how good a job they do carrying all the cars whose drivers want to use them: low-rated streets get priority for widenings and other “improvements” to move cars faster. The city wants to add ratings for walkability and bikeability, and set maximum sizes for intersections so they don’t become pedestrian-hostile behemoths.

Also for cyclists, the plan is to keep working on linking up existing bike lanes and paths to create a more integrated system, and extend routes to big employers and institutions outside downtown. The city also hopes to come up with a network of winter bike routes, lanes and streets that will be reliably plowed and see consistent use, rather than the semi-random treatment most bike lanes get from road crews now.

In rural Ottawa, the city wants to keep villages from sprawling. It hopes to direct most development to the three largest villages (Richmond, Manotick and Greely) and kit them out with more community and social services.