Residents take back sidewalk
Some cyclists make life difficult for Argyle Avenue pedestrians
Fed up with cyclists riding on their sidewalk, a group of Centretown residents took it over Monday afternoon, marking it up with chalk, making and hanging mobiles from trees, and thanking cyclists who dismounted and pushed their bikes instead of rolling through at speed.
It’s all about one block of Argyle Avenue, between the Queensway and the Museum of Nature, which is home to the main YMCA, the luxury Windsor Arms apartments, and the recently built Beaver Barracks social-housing project.
Argyle is also a one-way street and the block involved connects O’Connor and Metcalfe streets, two major northsouth arteries that carry drivers gunning it onto the highway or just beginning to slow down as they come off it.
“Our whole idea is to let people see the kids. What’s happened is people have stopped letting the kids out on the sidewalk in front of the Beaver Barracks because it’s too dangerous,” said Bill Brown, who’s lived at the Windsor Arms for 30 years. He’s counted as many as a dozen cyclists in an hour riding on the sidewalk in front of his building, where he tends the front garden.
“A particular problem on this block for us is the YMCA. Well, the YMCA for us is not a problem, but it’s situated on a one-way street. We have all these cyclists coming from the Glebe and eastern Centretown and the fastest way for people to get there is to ride on the sidewalk,” he said.
The number of conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians on the narrow sidewalk has grown as more people have moved into new phases of the Beaver Barracks, he said, and as biking has become more popular.
Argyle has more kids, more seniors, more dog-walkers, more everybody, all on a narrow stretch of concrete where cyclists are not legally supposed to be.
“What we’re asking people to do, because we don’t see any other way around it — it takes 60 seconds to walk your bike from the corner of Metcalfe to the Y,” Brown said. “I’ve timed it.”
The way the roads around it isolate the Y is an obvious problem. The apartments are to the east. Fast, one-way Catherine Street is to the south. Fast, one-way O’Connor Street is to the west. Argyle is a fairly safe side street but since it’s also a one-way street, it’s only any use for people coming from the west.
Brown said he’s never heard any talk of putting in a “contra-flow” bike lane, which would typically reserve space for westbound bikes on the south side of Argyle, but he thinks it’s a fine idea, even if it comes with some pain: it would almost certainly mean the end of his garden, which is mostly planted in a bulbout of the sidewalk along Argyle at Metcalfe.
Though the police were involved in the event aimed at fighting sidewalk cycling Monday, it wasn’t intended to be a ticketing blitz of the kind the police sometimes run.
Coun. Diane Holmes, who represents the area, was away from Ottawa Monday and couldn’t be reached, her staff said.