Calls to reopen Wellington street to car traffic shows our reluctance to think creatively about the use of space around our cultural and historical landmarks. When we do think creatively, it’s only to find new ways to shoot ourselves in the foot. Last week’s meeting of Ottawa’s newly named Planning and Housing Committee gave a perfect example of how driving and parking make the most seasonned businessmen completely irrational.
Preston Hardware is a local hardware store grown into the largest independent hardware retailer in Canada. Preston Hardware is buying-up a block of old houses to replace them by a larger building (presumably a condo tower), a process known as “land assembly.” Land assembly can be a long process, leading landowners to seek a quicker return on their investment as they wait out tenants and recalcitrant sellers. The fastest way to make a buck off a piece of vacant land is to turn it into a parking lot and that’s why Preston Hardware was in front of the Housing and Planning Committee last Wednesday.
At the time, I thought: “If charging for parking is the most profitable use of land in an area starved for more and better housing options, then there must be a problem with the incentives of doing so”
As it turned out, the disincentives of turning Preston Hardware’s vacant land into a parking lot were significant. The demolition permit for the two houses included not only a prohibition on using the land for parking (which was dealt with through a temporary parking permit) but a promise to present a development application within 5 years of the demolition under threat of fines ($5900 per building or roughly $12,000). Preston Hardware wanted to use the land as employee parking. In order to do so they had to:
Pay for the demolition of the two houses (not cheap)
Apply for a zoning by-law amendment to obtain a 3-year temporary parking permit (not cheap either)
Re-apply for an extension of the temporary permit 3 years later (more fees)
Pay $12,000 in fines for failing to develop the site within the prescribed timeframe.
Face six years of inflation on building materials and rising interest rates.
Committee agreed to extend the temporary parking permit for another year on the condition that paid parking be prohibited. In other words, Preston Hardware can only use the lot for free employee parking.
All worth it, according to the owner of Preston Hardware, because employees need to park somewhere. Fair enough. I wonder if paying for employees to park at the city parking lot 250m away would have been cheaper but I’m not a land economist, or hardware store owner for that matter. Which goes to show that financial carrots and sticks do not go the distance when it comes to our love affair with driving and parking. I don’t think that desincentives are the problem.
That’s what I had in mind when I heard Mayor Sutcliffe say that if we weren’t going to discuss the future of Wellington Street seriously, we might as well reopen it. He was supported by the Chair of the Transportation Committee Tim Tierney who said that Wellington street should be reopened to facilitate the increased traffic caused by the federal government’s return to the office. Is there hope in a city where levelling two houses and paying thousands of dollars of fines and development fees to provide free employee parking is considered the price of doing business?
There is no doubt that if a road is opened, cars will use it. There is also no doubt that the congestion relief will be short-lived if even noticeable. Drivers, motivated by the congestion relief, will quickly fill every available inch of road and we’ll be back to square one. City Councillors will soon vote to reopen the road based on their fear that leaving the road closed will provide a hook for voters to hang their traffic anger unto. Within days, the same voters will be stuck in traffic on Wellington and we’ll have moved on to another agenda item.
When a road has been closed for a year and traffic patterns have adapted to the closure, there should be a rule against reopening it. Ottawa talks a good game about reducing car dependency but always stops shy of taking meaningful measures to achieve it. It hopes that by providing the right incentives – A world-class transit system! State-of-the-art bike paths (in some places)!! (Limited) Pedestrian links!!! – people will naturally choose the longer, more tiring, more crowded, less flexible mode of transportation. Making transit and active transportation possible is only one prong of the pitchfork: we also need to make driving impossible: costly, impractical, painful. Until we stop taking measures to make driving more practical (like providing free parking), our best transit intentions will pave the way to traffic hell. We need the carrot and the stick. And if Preston Hardware is any indication, we will need a pretty big stick because even being irrationally expensive is not enough to cut it.
Our attachment to driving anywhere at no cost is preventing us from looking at better ways to use space, even in locations like Wellington street. I read a comment about Wellington Street stating that the closure to car traffic prevented someone from enjoying the beautiful view of of Parliement Hill. Our standard of enjoyment of significant cultural and historic landmark is seeing them through a car window, in movement. How enjoyable is it really? How meaningful? Would we relate differently to our heritage if we didn’t surround it with rows of moving cars?
In 2019, I visited my family in Rouen, a French “métropole” (a two-tiered municipality in Ontario lingo) and my mother’s birthplace. At the time, Rouen was closing on the first phase of a massive reinvention of its historical downtown called “Coeur de la Métropole” focused on the revitalization and pedestrianization of 4 areas of the historic downtown. One of these four areas surrounded the Cathedral, a masterpiece of Gothic architecture. Built and rebuilt over 800 years, each of its three towers was built in a different Gothic style. It also has a place in art history as the subject of a series of impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. I didn’t appreciate any of this as a child because the only time I saw the Cathedral was looking up from the backseat of a car in movement. I found one picture online of the Cathedral surroundings as I remember them:
When I was growing up, the Cathedral was surrounded by streets and parking spaces. Today, the Cathedral is surrounded by pedestrian plazas and walkways, connected to the rest of the historical downtown through a network of walkable links. When I visited in 2019, I felt like I was seeing the Cathedral for the first time. And maybe I was. Standing on the Cathedral plaza, pointing at a half-timbered house’s window looking on the Cathedral’s façade, my aunt told me that this was the room where Claude Monet painted his Cathedral series, 30 paintings showing the façade at different times of day, reflecting its changes in appearance under different lighting conditions. Standing there at dusk, I could see with my own eyes what Claude Monet had seen in 1890.
Making the surroundings of historical and cultural landmarks – like Parliament Hill – accessible to people, making it possible to experience and appreciate them from the same perspective as those who built them, plays an important role in fostering our connection to culture and history. In Ottawa, Parliament Hill might be appreciated by those who visit it as tourists, but for residents Wellington Street is an artery blocked by slow moving cars and tour buses. We are more likely to resent the popularity of the seat of government as we get stuck behind a slow moving vehicle than to be awed by it.
In Ottawa, the preservation of our cultural, architectural and natural heritage matters to residents but often looses the tug-of-war to other pressing matters like rapid development and transportation priorities. We can’t just make a case for preservation through academic or scientific appeals. We also need to give people an emotional sense that they belong to these places and that the places belong to them.
Wellington Street was closed down by a populist movement committed to dismantling the democratic institutions they came to protest in February 2022. Our institutions and their value are threatened by people who feel disconnected from their purpose and function. We can reclaim Wellington Street for the people and give Parliament Hill, its views and its surroundings, back to those it represents.
Closing down roads is a difficult and politically fraught decision. Let’s make it a good one.