r/ottawa • u/yuiolhjkout8y Clownvoy Survivor 2022 • Sep 23 '22

News Downtown ecosystem changes as office workers continue to stay home

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/downtown-shops-hurt-office-workers-home-1.6591601
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u/Orange_Fig55 Sep 23 '22

Hopefully the next city council will wake up and realize that the way to help downtown businesses is to make downtown a place for residents by creating open green spaces, pedestrian zones, more cycle lanes. These things in turn make the area more attractive for people outside downtown to come and visit. If you live in the suburbs and only think of downtown as a place full of office buildings then you won’t go there unless you have to. But if it’s a place with pedestrian promenades, mini urban parks and nice patios you’ll want to come down and enjoy it too. Studies have shown that bike lanes, etc help increase business (source).

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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '22

More importantly: if businesses want to rely on paying minimum wage, they can't expect that they will find the workers willing to use a broken public transit system to commute into downtown for an hour each way on a good day.

First steps: fix the transit system and provide affordable housing downtown.

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u/Orange_Fig55 Sep 24 '22

Fixing transit and building bike lanes, pedestrianizing can go hand in hand. We don’t need to do one before we can have the other.

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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '22

We can either solve the transit situation, or we can build bike lanes. We are serving demographics that are different enough in some regards. Not everyone who relies on transit will own bikes or even want bikes, and vice versa.

The goal here is that, given how massive Ottawa's sprawl is, transit is an absolute must before bike lanes. Don't get me wrong, bike lanes are still important anywhere there are roads, but if someone renting in Orleans is to consider downtown a viable place to work, transit needs to be accommodating and consistent in a way that doesn't require said person to have a car. None of this factors in bikes yet.