By Luke Barry
While the Confederation Line will modernize a city that predates the founding of Canada, the future of the historical centre of Ottawa is also top of mind for city planners, politicians and residents.
The goal of the ByWard Market Public Realm Plan – an ongoing series of public consultations and urban-design work attempting to delineate the best path forward – is to create a bold and memorable public environment which celebrates the district and its unique character.
Greening the district with 33% cover, prioritizing pedestrian space market-wide to 50 percent of the area and ensuring improved accessibility and lighting infrastructure are some of the key targets according to The Planning Partnership’s David Leinster.
The perspectives on how to best achieve these goals are as varied as the stakeholders themselves.
For his part, theExecutive Director of Marches d’Ottawa Markets, Jeff Darwin, believes a pedestrian oasis in the heart of the nation’s capital offers the ByWard Market the most alluring method of maximizing its potential.
“The predictions were, you know, when you close that [cut-through] to traffic, Dalhousie is going to back up, Sussex is going to back up, it’s going to be traffic chaos down here,” Jeff Darwin said. “So far, so good.”
“If it weren’t for the fire, frankly, we would have no way of testing this out, it was uphill, uphill, uphill. And I don’t want to say it was fortuitous, people lost their businesses and livelihood, but it gave us an opportunity to show that having a lot of people walking on the street is better than one car a minute driving around and the 11 parking spaces.”
The William Street pedestrian-plaza pilot project which Marches d’Ottawa Markets is overseeing officially opened on June 3 is at the very heart of one of the major sticking points: pedestrians versus cars.
“I think the response is probably more important because this data is available to everyone, the Western European example is available to everyone, the worldwide trend is available to everyone, but those from the car culture in particular are not going to buy it,” Darwin said. “They’ve come to believe that cars are what gets their patrons to their door.”
“We’re not just doing this because we thought it sounded good. We’re on the same page in terms of people trying to make a buck on the other side of the street, people trying to make a buck on this side of the street.”
As always, change presents both opportunities and challenges. But the ByWard Market is not Kanata Central; it is not apples to apples in this context.
“We want to establish a precinct and acknowledge that 30 percent live and work here like any other community across the city, but there’s a 30 percent of Greater Ottawa who come here and then there’s a 30 percent from around the world that come here, so we’ve got to do better at garbage pickup, better at lighting, better at cleanliness, better at service, better at security, we’ve got to do all those things better than the lowest common denominator that the City would like to see for municipal services,” Darwin said. “Going back to 2003, all the consultants came in and said ‘You need to prop up the ByWard Market, you need to hold it to a higher standard, you’ve got to do something for it.’”
Whether bringing the farmers back to the ByWard Market is essential to the future of the district depends on whom you ask, but the numbers indicate the farmer’s market aspect is facing tough days.
Local architect and heritage advisor Barry Padolsky penned an opinion piece for the Ottawa Citizen in May suggesting it would be “a wise and bold economic investment strategy” for the City to revitalize the farmers market. The logical thing to do – in Darwin’s mind anyway – is tap into parking revenue.
“One of the dirty little secrets about parking revenue down here, two very profitable for the city parking garages, 70 Clarence and 141 Clarence, and they make a ton of money for the City. One to three million dollars net a year and they play a lot of games bookkeeping-wise with them,” he said. “It’s a P[rofit] and L[oss] issue for them; it’s turf for them.”
“They [the City] acknowledge that there should be a public subsidy to run kick-ass outdoor public spaces, but they stopped short, they couldn’t politically get the parking revenue through or even a half-a-million-dollar-a-year subsidy. It’s a real tap dance.”
Challenging fiscal times are upon us, but Darwin feels his ask is the easier to digest.
“The angle I’m taking is give me point zero zero zero zero one of a revenue line and you won’t even miss the parking revenue from 70 Clarence and then that’s all I need,” he said. “It’s not as politically dangerous as having a new municipal services corporation or a municipal facilities corporation looking for a net new expense line from the Cty.”
The reality, of course, is that the parking revenue generated from the two main garages in the district funnels into municipal funds which may then go into parking infrastructure elsewhere in the City.
Interestingly, one of the factors the City is not confronting with regard to parking concerns many have expressed in and around ByWard Market is the impact of ride-sharing platforms like Uber and Lyft as well as the forthcoming LRT.
“There’s a lot of unknowns,” Ward 12 Rideau-Vanier Councillor Mathieu Fleury said. “If post LRT phase one, post LRT phase two when we’re connected to the airport, if we realize, ‘Hey there’s a need,’ then frankly the private sector will have covered that need with underground parking very quickly.”
“So if the city’s wrong, I think the underground environment will have shifted, and yeah the City might not manage the parking, but the private sector will chew at it.”
Some have posited the ByWard Market is headed the way of the dodo bird. Others maintain that things are on the up and up.
“Statistically, the numbers, when we talk to the merchants, it’s never been higher,” Fleury said during the most recent public-realm consultation. “There’s folks that have been in the zone for 30 years, they see their numbers year after year, they’re like ‘I don’t know what to tell you, since 2017 it’s been great.’”
“Winterlude was greatTulip Fest was great, so that, to us, is an indicator.”
Not everyone is convinced the status quo will suffice and so the City, a team of urban design professionals, businesses and residents are currently – and collectively – charting a way towards a better ByWard.
“Every time we go out to consultation, well people feel it’s not welcoming, people feel it’s not beautiful, people feel the look and feel of the market in terms of street layout is outdated,” Councillor Fleury said. “So at some point, something needs to give. We either don’t do anything, leave it as is or we invest.”
It should be encouraging to all observers that significant resources, time and energy has been, and will continue to be, put into place-making in the historic heart of the nation’s capital.
Further information on the city’s ByWard Market Public Realm plan can be found online at ottawa.ca/designbyward.