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Strong Towns Ottawa

@strongtownsottawa.ca

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Strongtownsottawa.ca We're an urbanist group, focused on safer streets, giving citizens more options, and creating a more financially responsible city. Help us support bus lanes on Bank St: strongtownsottawa.ca/Bank

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 13d

To anyone who came out to the open house yesterday about bus lanes on bank... Wow, what an amazing amount of support. Unanimously every speaker, besides the BIA, said they want the city to be BOLDER!

We've written a summary of the event here : strongtownsottawa.ca/2025/09/25/t...

The City Needs to be Bold with Bank

What is "balance"?

strongtownsottawa.ca

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 17h

Pat is doing the hard work that needs to be done for us to make the right decisions in this city. Great job Pat!

Pat Bickerton @pbickerton.bsky.social · 17h

Over at @strongtownsottawa.ca we've calculated the productivity of different development patterns in #OttCity. Tax per hectare is easy.

Lately, I've been estimating the cost of servicing. These numbers are much more abstract but it's been fun.

Here is some data I'm tracking.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 17h

Lets get one of these bad boys on Bank Street! N-S could use a couple easier connections from the city as well, instead of being bogged down behind single occupancy vehicles! - Marko

Reposted by Strong Towns Ottawa

Toon Dreessen @toondreessen.bsky.social · 1d

This is why we need bus lands on Bank Street. We don’t need extensive consultations or debates or both side-ism to find a “balance;” we need bold action, bold leadership to design public space in the public interest and just do it. @strongtownsottawa.ca

Glen Gower @glengower.ca · 1d

Between the bus-only lanes, and the off-ramp detours, we’ve barely slowed down. Unless you’re on a bus, it’s a parking lot out there.

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Glen Gower @glengower.ca · 1d

An @octranspo.com double decker bus this morning, skipping ahead of all the traffic in our bus-only lane from Kanata. 👍

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Reposted by Strong Towns Ottawa

Hans on the Bike @hansonthebike.bsky.social · 1d

The number of fines went op bc we installed a lot more cameras. That the average speed actually went down, as is the purpose of the cameras, is shown in this image by @strongtownsottawa.ca

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Reposted by Strong Towns Ottawa

Pat Bickerton @pbickerton.bsky.social · 3d

Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) cameras are working in College Ward.

I graphed the 85th percentile speed of cars by the age of the camera. College Ward has two older cameras (1000+ days) and 2 x younger (100 days).

You can see how speeds quickly trend downward once the cameras are installed.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

And proper transit dedicated lanes! Funding and scheduling can only do so much when single occupancy vehicles are blocking the way of a bus packed with 50+ people! - Marko

Reposted by Strong Towns Ottawa

Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · 8d

“Expanding the average car length from 5 meters (16.4 ft) to 5.5 meters (18 ft) decreases street parking spots by 9.3%, while an additional expansion to 6m (19.7 ft) causes a further loss of 7%…the growing share of larger vehicles has caused many on-street parking spots to effectively disappear.”

Meet the Montreal Mayor Who Declared War on SUVs

Oversized vehicles are devouring street parking spaces in the Canadian city. So one borough’s mayor is fighting back with bigger fees for hefty trucks and SUVs.

www.bloomberg.com

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

Exactly, that building is definitely not pulling more from infrastructure than it's contributing through DCs and property tax. - Marko

Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

Oh completely agree, the Kanata Links development is absolutely atrocious, there was so much potential and they just did the most basic SFH sprawl that you could ask for...

I wasn't implying that they'd be the same, just that anyone can make anything sound good with words. - Marko

Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

We're focusing on the wrong problems. Community Benefit Charges that fund our parks are not the reason housing is too expensive. That ~$500,000,000 Greenbank "Realignment" (Widening) though? Yea that's probably gonna put a dent in the housing affordability from DCs.

It's Jamie @sjamieit.bsky.social · 6d

170 Slater, the collapsed parking garage being redeveloped into 538 residential units.

Community Benefits Charge (CBC): ~$600,000
Development Charges (DC): ~$13,000,000

Of those DCs, about $3-million goes exclusively towards suburban arterial roads. Those should be eliminated long before the CBCs.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

It is quite literally almost exclusively low density housing in the form of single-family homes, yet claims it's got a "unique mix of housing types", and that it will "integrate seamlessly". The words don't match the actual built form unfortunately. - Marko

Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

We've seen a lot of "urban-washing" in recent years, take the development on Kanata Links golf course that's supposed to go forward.

kanatapossibilities.ca

Kanata Possibilities

kanatapossibilities.ca

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

If the project does go forward, we sincerely hope it is implemented in a way such that it can actually be a success and add to the beauty of our city, but the track record of sprawled development in this city is very poor.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

Obviously there is a world where this becomes a dense area that can support it's own infrastructure costs and doesn't add on to the already extremely ballooned debt that we have as a city, but pretty words won't get us to that world, and the odds are we won't see that reality.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

We are currently in an extremely large infrastructure debt over the next couple decades, and the sewer cost alone is around ~600m dollars, which is something we definitely don't have.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

www.cbc.ca

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

More people being car dependent is pretty much the opposite of what we need in this moment. Then add on all of the extremely large infrastructure costs for sewer and road, when we could be fitting those 45,000 people into areas where we already have most of this infrastructure built.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

The nearest train station is a 15 minute drive away, this is the closest point in Tewin, the rest of the development would be even further away. It is difficult to imagine a world where people here will rely on transit to get into the core, and it will almost certainly not be fully self-contained.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

There are obviously still a lot of specifics to be ironed out, but it is very difficult to believe that anything here will truly be much different than many of our other outer greenbelt suburbs. Words are easy to say and unfortunately difficult to follow through on as we've seen with our city.

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 6d

Extremely intelligent I've heard said many times! All the people are saying this! - Marko

Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 7d

People sometimes think Bank Street needs bus lanes only during "peak" hours. The data shows otherwise : the largest delays are during the hours outside of "peak", when buses weave in and out of parking lanes.

Our city deserves reliable service all day, for all kinds of trips, with 24/7 bus lanes.

Image showing the travel times for bus routes 6 and 7 in the corridor of Bank Street going northbound and southbound between Aylmer and Chamberlain. The data shows significant large delays outside of the "peak hours" that the city has deemed where bus lanes are needed.

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Reposted by Strong Towns Ottawa

Marko @markomiljusevic.bsky.social · 7d

Solving the housing crisis won't happen by continuing the same development patterns we've followed for the last 70 years. That's how we got into this mess in the first place 🤦‍♂️

Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 7d

It is frustrating to see people use the housing crisis to justify any sort of housing. Tewin is NOT the way we should be building housing. It will only deepen city debt and fuel our decades-long sprawl addiction. Expensive roads and sewers are not something we can afford.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Councillor moves to reverse city's approval for Tewin development | CBC News

Coun. Theresa Kavanagh says the sprawling housing project didn't go through proper consultation and will cost the city a fortune in infrastructure.

www.cbc.ca

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Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 7d

Yea good point. A lot of the costs that come with sprawl aren't felt until decades down the line when the infrastructure that was initially often paid for with DCs (Development Charges) have to be maintained by the low density that can't support the costs. - Marko

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It's Jamie @sjamieit.bsky.social · 7d

"Reopened" Percy Street. Sidewalks still blocked off, vehicle sensors didn't work, several cars running the red light, honking at each other, honking at cyclists, traffic backed up down the block.

"Doesn't qualify for traffic calming."

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Reposted by Strong Towns Ottawa

Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 8d

Just a reminder, this project began June 2024. There were 15 months between open houses. And we got about 3 blocks of red paint and a few hours a day.

If the city had presented & implemented what it presented last week it would have been a massive win in our books

But it's taken a year & 3 months.

Strong Towns Ottawa @strongtownsottawa.ca · 10d

One of our wonderful members made this great video about buses on Bank Street.

Crazy to think that the 88 is getting a full BRT (which it absolutely deserves) meanwhile the city can't even put bus lanes for the busiest bus corridor in the city? Make it make sense!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtWH...

Ottawa Won’t Build Bus Lanes

YouTube video by Casual Commuter

www.youtube.com

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