Storied Infrastructure: Tracing Traffic, Place, and Power in Canada’s Capital City Nick Scott

The street yearns for action nobler than traffic. Leonard Cohen Montreal 1964

ost canadians depend on a car, truck, or bus for everyday Mtravel and worry about congestion and the price of gas. The recent bailout of the auto sector and stimulus spending on roads, bridges, and highways reveal the commitment of Canadian governments to expanding traffic through motor vehicle use. As a shared way of flowing and idling in the world, however, traffic, in spite of mass participation and immense eco- logical import, remains a relatively elusive idea, and one too frequently dominated by a functionalist engineering approach. As a technoscientific attempt to eliminate congestion, this approach overlooks social under- standings of traffic, its politics, and its cultural significance. I aim to extend an alternative understanding of “traffic” as irreducible to either congestion or itinerancy but marked instead by multiple relations of stasis and flow among human and nonhuman actors. To this end I draw on two different literatures, mobility studies and narrative approaches to urban planning, to explore how people imagine and practise traffic in a spatial culture of automobility.

ESC 36.1 (March 2010): 149–174 This narrative approach to urban planning highlights the multiplicity of traffic and the agency of material infrastructure (see Latour). By fore- grounding the different voices of streets, I aim to defamiliarize the habitual Nick Scott is a voice of automobility. In contrast to modernization cum motorization nar- doctoral candidate ratives which follow a teleological plot line, the stories that streets tell from in sociology and different temporal and spatial perspectives have the potential to disrupt a anthropology at natural, apolitical culture of car-dependence. The mobilities literature that Carleton University. I will rely on argues that buildings, roads, and other kinds of places gain His research meaning through the ways in which they carry or constrict the flows of interests include subjects, ideas, and objects. It views streets as sociotechnical ensembles travel practices, city of tarmac, electricity, hydrocarbons, values, juridical systems, and habitus. planning, cultures Built for particular bodies and machines, streets evoke the discursive and of mobility, and political construction of traffic alongside hard infrastructure. the politics of car After situating traffic within mobilities and narrative approaches to dependence in planning, I follow the stories of five prominent streets in Canada’s capi- Canada. He is most tal city. represents a strategic case study of mobility and plan- interested in emerging ning. Like Canberra, Brasilia, and New Delhi, Ottawa is a living prod- spaces of sustainable uct of muscular, modernist planning of the last century which equated travel as they interact national progress with mass automobility. To a greater degree than other with everyday life. conurbations in Canada, traffic in the National Capital Region reflects a totalizing vision of the good city in which the car is tied to modernity, national identity, and power. By engaging what some have called a rela- tional “politics of mobility” (Cresswell, “Politics”; Simpson; Henderson), I argue that Ottawa’s streets articulate a deeply contested process by which automobility has become systematically invested with forms of material and immaterial power denied to other forms of traffic. To build my case I draw on media discourse, photographs, planning documents, developmen- tese, and field observations. Through these materials I show that, along with the daily lives of street users, cars, and their manifold interactions, a critical if frequently forgotten world of traffic resides in the stories of streets themselves.

Assembling a Politics of Automobility Over the last decade, research on the movement of people, goods, and ideas has enjoyed increasing attention. A growing interdisciplinary lit- erature on “mobilities” explores how movement mediates social life and the creation of meaningful spaces in which people live together. The “mobilities paradigm,” as some refer to it, includes “studies of corporeal movement, transportation and communications infrastructures, capi- talist spatial restructuring, migration and immigration, citizenship and

150 | Scott transnationalism, and tourism and travel” (Hannam et al. 9–10). These studies have two things in common. First, they explore the proliferation of mobilities, exploring how interdependent institutions and novel sociotech- nical networks, from currency markets and exurban commutes to mobile social networking, bring individual biographies unevenly into contact with globalized flows of people, products, and information. Second, mobility studies just as importantly form a response to dominant conceptions of movement. In particular, mobility contrasts with conceptions in trans- port geography and engineering geared toward maximizing the economic efficiency and productivity of movement. Cresswell usefully distinguishes mobility from movement as one might distinguish place from location: “It is produced and given meaning within relations of power” (“Politics” 20). A definition of mobilities as socially contexualized movement shaped by systemically uneven power relations may well serve a critical under- standing of traffic. To strengthen this connection, I now turn to relations between mobilities and space. The mundane mobilities that make up everyday traffic shape the pro- duction of space. Traffic models which quantify the relationship between mobility and space conceive of “person-trips” as a predictable outcome, determined by road capacity, desire lines, a matrix of origins and des- tinations, and traffic control devices. However, people driving together frequently “misbehave” and deviate from the rules of traffic. Fraught with perceptual limitations and asymmetrical communication, car travel resembles a complex play of emotions strewn across disconnected yet intimate moral dramas (Katz 49). In contrast to classic utilitarian actors, coolly processing information and making rational choices, people on the road struggle to project and affirm their identities and often react with strong emotion to perceived slights and acts of kindness. What becomes diminished in an abstract model of traffic, then, is the performative, lived production of space. Different practices of mobility do more than conform to their physical environments; dialectically, they construct cities, streets, and neighbourhoods. In the same way that Henri Lefebvre suggests every society, with its mode of production and unique history, “produces a space, its own space” (31), we can think of mobilities as texturing the built envi- ronment in particular ways. In other words, city space, be it a building, billboard, or superhighway, gains meaning and agency through the way it variously affords and stymies the movement of bodies and other objects. While mobilities help organize city life and urban growth, they do so in dramatically different ways. A prominent area of mobilities research focuses on the difference the automobile makes in terms of actively shap-

Storied Infrastructure | 151 ing how people live together. “Automobility” constitutes a hegemonic form of mobility in North America. Road-building consortia, hydrocarbon industries, and real estate developers invest automobility with tremendous economic capital. Cultural representations of car travel, including sym- bolic associations with freedom, autonomy, and domination over nature, pervade the most prolific field of advertising in the world (Conley and McLaren). Automobilities, then, refer to the social worlds built around the private, petroleum-powered motor vehicle following its awkward entrance on narrow nineteenth-century streets cobbled together for foot traffic. As Peters notes, “passages” have been opened over time and widened for auto- mobile flows, often to the detriment of walking, cycling, and public transit (136). Saliently, an ambivalence characterizes the levels of car dependence we now find in wealthy countries such as Canada, where about three out of four people rely on the automobile to reach the majority of their daily destinations (Turcotte 22). Car travel has many individual benefits that come at high collective cost. The car affords efficient, personal, and easy mobility year round for many people and, as a result, contributes immensely to living standards and connections between families and communities that might otherwise languish. Conversely, curtailing car use could severely reduce mobility options in North American cities which currently lack the European- style population densities necessary for good public transit and cycling networks. On the other hand, the sprawling, functionally segregated envi- ronments where cars are indispensable were actively constructed to be car dependent. As a result, these environments now underwrite some of the most daunting environmental and health crises of the twenty-first century. The prevalence of high blood pressure, obesity, and associated conditions such as diabetes increase in low-density, homogeneous suburbs that discourage routine walking, cycling, and outdoor play. Sundering biodiverse habitats and migration corridors, car-based suburbs deplete and contaminate watersheds by increasing runoff and removing natu- ral filtration systems. Transportation, moreover, accounts for a fourth of global co2 emissions and the fastest-growing sector for the primary heat-trapping greenhouse gas (Sperling and Gordon 4). Critically, these environmental and health costs of automobility fall disproportionately on the shoulders of those least equipped to handle them, especially low- income groups, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities (Frumkin, Frank, and Jackson). The problems associated with car dependence have inspired reform efforts. The language of smart growth, new urbanism, and sustainability

152 | Scott appears in many provincial and municipal planning documents. Light rail and streetcar systems appear poised for a significant comeback in the United States, while among large Canadian cities only Ottawa currently lacks a rail system to help condense urban growth. A postautomobility [N]arrative literature, too, has emerged, exploring the demise of the car as we know it. In After the Car, for example, Dennis and Urry consider how new tech- approaches to nologies combined with new work and leisure practices could help tip the system of automobility. In spite of interest in reform, however, Canadian traffic planning governments at all levels are expending unprecedented resources on the repair and expansion of road infrastructure, designed not for a new postcar can strengthen a system but for the familiar car system with its associated spaces. Canada’s capital is representative in this respect. It recently slated $1.5 billion for mobility politics road construction and widening from 2008 to 2017 and in the 2009 budget allocated $133 million for public transit and about $1 million for cycling by (Patterson 1). To be fair, Ottawa currently has plans to build a light rail system but one which would not extend outside the city’s urban core to foregrounding where the city is growing, and not compactly. Canada’s unabashed commitment to expand one of the largest car-road the agency of networks on earth highlights a need to sharpen, in the case of car travel, what Cresswell, Simpson, Henderson, and others have called a “politics streets, avenues, of mobility.” For Simpson, such a politics describes “the contestatory pro- cesses that produce different forms of movement, and that invest these and arterial forms with social value, cultural purchase, and discriminatory power” (xiii–xiv). According to Cresswell, a politics of mobility must include an highways. “awareness of the mobilities of the past” and must also “constantly consider the politics of obduracy, fixity, and friction” (28–29). How has automobil- ity become invested with material power and cultural purchase denied to other forms of mobility? On what kinds of obduracy do automobilities rely? Henderson, for one, addresses these questions, examining southern American “secession by car” in which motor vehicles figure into racial segregation, anti-urban values, and capitalist growth strategies (148). Here, I will consider a capital case of Canadian automobility, in which the car plays a leading role in a local drama about national progress and the good life. To elaborate a politics of automobility, we can follow the voices of a neglected group of nonhuman actors centrally involved in the production of traffic: roads. In the next section, before considering the case of Ottawa, I will explore how narrative approaches to traffic planning can strengthen a mobility politics by foregrounding the agency of streets, avenues, and arterial highways.

Storied Infrastructure | 153 Planning Traffic: Narrative Approaches

Narrative approaches to urban planning recognize the various authors, readers, and storylines at work in the production of mobilities. “Social agents,” as Jensen puts it, “give voice to ideas of spatial change in the city by means of local narratives and stories nested within discourses” (218). Mobilities take shape in the words of plans which are plotted and rehearsed. As a form of storytelling, planning draws boundaries around communities. Consequently, persuasive storytelling depends in part upon the ability of authors to tell the stories of others or to use voices which resonate across socioeconomic and ethnocultural fault lines. In this sense, as Eckstein describes, planners make spaces for stories to be told, spaces which can be judged by how successfully they “conscript” strangers into dialogue (31). Here, I will single out three kinds of authors who stand out in the process of planning traffic: developers, city councillors, and experts (planners and engineers). Private developers, who attach potent symbols of freedom, luxury, and safety to peripheral housing starts, exert tremendous influence over transportation services and traffic patterns. “The clanking semiotics of developmentese can be painful to consider,” notes Rotella, but it helps construct “a fragmentary city of feeling from elements of the city of fact—a city of feeling that will, to the extent that buyers take notice, have a significant reflexive effect on the city of fact” (101). Second, city representatives help author traffic. Tied to parochial ward concerns about noise and congestion, municipal councillors, far more than their provincial and federal counterparts, tell stories about traffic. Finally, city planners and engineers have many tools at their disposal with which to manipulate stories about traffic. These experts, by applying specialized definitions of optimal road capacity and efficient service, render concep- tual traffic operational. If narrators authorize spaces for telling stories, readers shape the production of traffic through their conscription into the planning narra- tive. Since the mid-nineties, much ink has been spilled on civic engage- ment and deliberative democracy. However, despite academic interest and legislation formalizing public consultation, garnering active public involvement in planning remains a considerable challenge. This challenge is particularly acute at a normative level, where shared goals and objec- tives are negotiated versus the implementation stage where details are ironed out. Transportation planning, for example, frequently relies on open-house-style public meetings where professional consultants outline plans and demarcate a space for community concerns. Planners manag-

154 | Scott ing road design studies will often present lovely architectural images of planters and benches and ask the public where these objects should go in relation to images of happy pedestrians and cyclists. However, they frequently will have already made the decision to widen a road in order to improve the level of service, and suggestions by the public to lower the speed limit or increase the number of crosswalks will require vetting by a technical advisory committee of engineers concerned with minimizing flow barriers. Still, a key test facing the enrolment of readers into planning spaces lies in how well that space incorporates and ultimately translates local neighbourhood concerns and traditions. Although not easily separated from their authors and readers, stories themselves also shape mobility planning by connecting characters and manipulating time and space to create an arc of events. Spatial perspec- tive provides a critical tool with which planning stories engender meaning. High modernist planners, for example, established a peculiar vantage point. Suffering from what Jan Gehl calls the “Brasilia syndrome,” “bird-shit architects” looked down on the city in order to impose a totalizing order, “planning from high above and dropping their things down.” Obversely, a street planner concerned with the self-isolating effects of modernist superblocks could consider, looking horizontally, a hapless pedestrian’s point of view. Temporal perspective, too, provides significant fodder for narration. Suburban wetlands and old-growth forests, for instance, have within short-term horizons been represented as economically viable loca- tions for low-density housing starts, yet within a longer term horizon the same space may appear ecologically indispensable in the form of a wetland and old-growth forest. Along with perspective, spatial and temporal scale furnish additional tools to understand actors in stories about mobility. A planner-storyteller might consider the difference between a truck train, or long-combination vehicle, and a smaller scale lorry. The former, in addi- tion to tormenting civil engineers by destroying paved surfaces, require more time-space to stop than the lorry, in turn reducing possibilities for safe pedestrian crossings and creating long self-isolating blocks. In sum, in order to impose order on otherwise disconnected, if not chaotic events, narratives manipulate the most basic of contexts for action. The final aspect of narrative approaches to planning that I will high- light is the ability of compelling stories to make hegemonic spaces seem strange. Compelling planning narratives effectively offer a cultural critique of everyday life. They challenge strategies of domination “that inure us to the status quo by effectively short-circuiting our ability to envisage and enact different ways of living” (Gardiner 244). I concur with Eckstein:

Storied Infrastructure | 155 An effective story is that narrative which stands the habits of everyday life on their heads so that blood fills those brainy cavities with light. Such a story fully exploits the materials of [time and space], deliberately arranging them in unfamiliar ways so that they conscript readers who are willing to suspend their habits of being and come out in the open to engage in dialogue with strangers. (35–36) The ecological and corporeal costs of automobility, including the routin- ized violence of daily collisions, suggest the long-run unsustainability of car dependence. Currently, however, automobility continues to expand in Canada, backed by deep-seated political and economic interests which work to entrench the household normality of two and three personal vehi- cles and the segregated spaces which invite their intensive use. Exactly what kind of postcar world might arise in North America remains less than pellucid. But challenging a culture of car dependence in the present will require shaking a technological habitus (see Sterne), inculcated since child- hood, which takes the car as a self-evident norm against which to imagine alternative mobilities. Non-human actors, especially hard infrastructures, bear a powerful effect on this habitus and may reinforce a generational forgetfulness by which ever-more automobility becomes the new natural state of traffic. I see the task of defamiliarizing mundane roads and streets through the use of compelling narratives as a critical element in a politics of automobility, a politics that would “prepare us for and produce ruptures in our quotidian lives” (Eckstein 25). In the next section, I assemble a nar- rative that challenges the story of automobility as an inevitable outcome of technological progress. By tracing the lives of five streets in Ottawa, I explore a story of the car becoming systematically invested with material and symbolic power denied to other agencies of traffic.

The Storied Lives of Infrastructure

Sparks Street Blues

In the future, will be one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ottawa’s Central Area, and an impor- tant focus for retail, commercial and pedestrian activity in the Central Business District. (City of Ottawa, “Official Plan” vol. 2a, sec. 1.13) “Now it’s just a place where government workers go eat their lunches.” (Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien, quoted in Chianello)

156 | Scott

Figure 1: Sparks Street at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night.

Sparks Street conscripts readers through many voices, but perhaps most audible is the weekday morning gasp with which it inhales a great swath of Ottawa’s workforce into the urban core before exhaling them back out after a day’s work. One of Ottawa’s oldest streets in the heart of its original business district, but a stone’s throw south of the neo-Gothic tombs of Canadian Parliament, on its surface Sparks tells the story of a failed pedes- trian mall. As late as the 1950s Sparks was considered Ottawa’s Broadway, prone to street parties as trams poured crowds of people into a narrow sixty-foot-wide passageway teeming with shops, theaters, hotels, and res- taurants. Visitors bumped into each other but also into people who lived there. As a recent report to the National Capital Commission recounts, “for almost a hundred years, it was the economic, political and cultural hub of the city” (Bray, Gordon, and Osborne chap. 8, 5). By the 1970s, however, it became clear that Ottawa’s Broadway had begun to wilt. Some of its decline was driven by trends occurring all over the continent, especially a pervasive decentralization whereby families left downtown for large lots in new suburbs serviced by modern shopping malls with free parking. Some factors were unique to the Canadian capital. As World War ii came to a

Storied Infrastructure | 157 close, Prime Minister Mackenzie King retained Jacques Gréber, the leading urban planner in France at the time, to produce a plan for the National Capital which would accelerate suburbanization in a variety of ways, such The slow as purging much of the workforce to large peripheral office parks (Gordon). In the 1970s, moreover, the federal government became a dominating and seepage of life ultimately homogenizing force on the street itself, expropriating properties for new modernist office complexes close to Parliament Hill. Today, a ritual from Sparks collapse of human activity can be observed as civil servants decamp their office towers and retire to Ottawa’s bedroom communities, underlining Street why Sparks, according to Ottawa’s mayor, needs to be revitalized. The slow seepage of life from Sparks Street corresponds with rising corresponds action in the story of automobility. Car ownership diffused faster in south- ern than elsewhere in Canada (Davies). Ottawa was reporting with rising “serious” traffic problems as early as 1923 (Taylor 146), where a car parked on the side of the street or a truck trying to unload could engender gridlock, action in the owing fundamentally to the fact that automobiles occupy far more space per person than do trams. Congestion, more effectively than shareholder story of greed or the failure of the Ottawa Electric Company to modernize its fleet, stymied service along busy thoroughfares such as Sparks (Bray, Gordon, automobility. and Osborne chap. 5, 2). Poor service made Ottawa’s private streetcar company an easy target for detractors. Jacques Gréber did not conceal his conviction that tramlines were compromising Ottawa’s chances of becoming a modern capital and that motorized public transport was the way of the future: The main streets in the centre of Ottawa are encumbered with all the elements detrimental to traffic circulation and aesthet- ics: tramway lines, with the added inconvenience of bilateral parking, overhead wiring and its supporting poles … We are confident that all tramway lines will ultimately disappear from the urban scene, as is the case in most modern cities.… The auto bus is therefore the only practical transportation system suitable for central urban areas. (“Plan” 127, 257)

Abolishing rail from urban space set in motion other elements in the Gréber plan, which, rare among urban plans, enjoyed comprehensive implementation. Retiring streetcar lines and removing Union Station and heavy rail infrastructure to suburban Ottawa opened up precious rights-of-way that were exploited for new arterial roads and a superhigh- way (Gréber, “Plan” 165; Gordon). Automobility, a system of social and physical space for the motor vehicle, had arrived: Gréber managed to

158 | Scott “persuade Ottawans to convert what had been the busiest tram route in the city, Sparks Street, into a pedestrian mall.” Seven decades after it was introduced, the private motorcar had turned urban Ottawa inside out: “Many would thereafter walk on Sparks to escape the fast-moving traffic and Diesel fumes that the decisions of the past sixty-nine years had made possible” (Davis 374). The conditions which ensured its initial success as one of North Ameri- ca’s first outdoor pedestrian malls were established long before 1966, when traffic was first turned over to feet as per Gréber’s suggestion. From the time of Confederation to World War i, Sparks functioned as Ottawa’s spinal cord, transmitting motor signals to disparate parts of the city and shaping the central pattern of traffic. Bridging Ottawa’s deep ethnocultural and class enclaves, Upper Town and Lower Town, the street fostered an impressive mix of land uses, including international commerce, industry, markets, schools, churches, and housing, which together assembled “a meeting place for the public and the primary ‘beat’ of the influential. Here, politicians rubbed shoulders with the powerful and public alike” (Bray, Gordon, and Osborne chap. 1, 6). People not only had a variety of reasons to go to Sparks and stay for a while (if only to watch other people), but, critically, they had at their disposal ready collective access. Once passen- ger trains had punctured Ottawa’s surrounding wilderness, national and international foot traffic reached Union Station (when it was downtown), on Sparks’s eastern doorstep. Limited crossings over the , moreover, had aligned Sparks into a focal passage for horse car and then tramway traffic. In demolishing streetcar lines and accelerating suburban decentral- ization, Gréber, the federal government, and the city had not only retired a distinctive mode of traffic but also a compact form of urban growth anchored around rails in the street. Vibrant pedestrian malls share the same basic traffic pattern that Jane Jacobs famously described of vibrant neighbourhood parks: a diverse mix of people using the space for differ- ent reasons at a variety of times. As the monolithic plazas of government moved in and the various shops and almost all of the people living on Sparks moved out, single land uses smothered entire blocks. Immense structures, such as the Bank of Canada and the C. D. Howe building, delib- erately turned their backs on the street, accommodating internal retail space while turning the eye-level street outside into a sunlight-deprived wind tunnel (Bray, Gordon, and Osborne chap. 7, 3). Currently Sparks becomes alive at lunchtime on weekdays, and then, in the words of a local historian, we are “cursed with the Sparks Street Mall at night” (Jenkins).

Storied Infrastructure | 159 Sussex Memorial Drive

Figure 2: Roadside memorial for a cyclist killed in traffic.

City Council shall recognize and support as a distinctive street, known as the Mile of History and as part of Confederation Boulevard. The street shall feature significant heritage buildings and shall function as a shopping street. (City of Ottawa, “Official Plan” vol. 2a, sec. 1.53) The city’s cycling plan states there will be a future dedicated cycling facility along Sussex Drive, although [according to the city’s cycling co-ordinator] “it’s not at the design point yet.” (Hurley)

160 | Scott The federal government dedicated the Gréber Plan for the capital as “a last- ing and living memorial to the War” (Gréber “Speech”), and Ottawa’s most famous address keeps many of its monuments, not all of which memo- rialize Canadian soldiers. Sussex Drive needs no introduction. It boasts the prime minister’s residence, Major’s Hill Park, the National Gallery, the governor general’s residence at Rideau Hall as well as the American Embassy, albeit perched behind Jersey barriers to prevent collisions with terrorists. Ottawa’s pre-eminent ceremonial route, part shopping street and part “multi-modal arterial road corridor with a ceremonial route role” (City of Ottawa, “Project Commencement”), recently attracted attention for another reason, however, at least in traffic circles. Namely, the road marks out a front line in an increasingly violent struggle between automo- bilists and so-called utility cyclists, or the audacious 2 percent of Ottawans (City of Ottawa, “Cycling Plan” 1–5) who regularly thwart Ottawa’s car streets by using bicycles to get where they are going. In late September 2009, while leaving a bike path which had abruptly ended, thirty-four-year-old Melanie Harris crossed a sidewalk onto the arterial section of Sussex and was struck and killed by a city bus. Several months later, a fifty-five-year-old cyclist suffered minor injuries after being struck by a car in the same area, adding to a recent string of high profile cycling-car collisions in the region. A ghost bike memorial marks the site of Melanie’s death, bringing an international movement started in Mis- souri, 2003, for the first time to Ottawa (see www.ghostbikes.org). Painted white and adorned with flowers and personal tokens, the ghost bike bears many similarities to roadside death memorials assembled in the late twen- tieth and early twenty-first centuries (Belshaw and Purvey). Together these somber shrines symbolize the little-discussed displacement of violent human death from extraordinary theatres of war to mundane roads that lead people to work and the grocery store. In spite of small numbers and a grim reminder of their vulnerability on Sussex, cyclists exert substantial and growing influence on the theory and practice of traffic in Ottawa. The National Capital Commission, for example, or the federal arm of the city’s government, recently led city officials on a northern Europe “fact-finding mission” to discover ways in which to Copenhagenize Ottawa. Before and after the trip, the ncc announced a monumental policy shift by recogniz- ing the bicycle as a legitimate participant in traffic.

Storied Infrastructure | 161 King Edward’s Very Large Trucks

Figure 3: A pedestrian waits for a truck on King Edward Avenue.

The area’s harsh street environment will soften through abun- dant tree planting and streetscape improvements.… Secure, inviting pedestrian corridors will result, creating a sense of cohesiveness with neighbouring areas. In particular, efforts will focus on improving pedestrian safety and access across King Edward Avenue, thus reuniting the Lowertown commu- nity. (City of Ottawa, “Official Plan” vol. 2a, sec. 1.81) Let’s put it plainly. King Edward Avenue is a civic disgrace. The street has been destroyed by excessive traffic and the city has failed to return it to a liveable standard, even after an order by the Ontario Municipal Board. It’s time to put people ahead of cars and do something about this problem. (Denley)

Just north of the Royal Canadian Mint, Sussex Drive arcs over a much heavier, much louder six-lane arterial road called King Edward Avenue. From the overpass, it is hard to miss the steady through truck traffic which has been the bane of local residents’ existence since 1965, the year when the grand boulevard’s great elms came down and the interprovin- cial Macdonald-Cartier bridge went up. During this time in Lowertown,

162 | Scott a comparatively poor and heterogeneous neighbourhood in , King Edward’s four lanes became six, and six nearly became more. An American consultant retained to produce a far-reaching traffic and transportation plan for Ottawa (currently designing streetcars in Utah) was recommending an extensive system of limited-access expressways to head off a looming crisis of congestion (Smith 173). In 1967 area residents were informed of the eventual demolition of their homes for a freeway. The freeway remained theoretical—it was never built—but it dealt a material blow from which Lowertown took decades to recover. City consultants discovered in 1975, for example, before the project was officially canceled, that “the effect of the Freeway proposal has been neglect of properties in the [forty-acre] study area,” and that much of surrounding neighbourhood was “characterized by planning blight.” Although most of the buildings had not been affected in a “physical sense” by the freeway, ninety-one build- ings within the study area, or 44 percent, were found to be structurally unsound (Murray and Murray 2–3, 6). Another social effect of late 1960s superhighway fever was the mobi- lization of community organizations, particularly in wealthy neighbour- hoods. The New Edinburgh Community Alliance, for example, rose up against plans to complete the “Eastview Vanier Arterial.” In 1973, and for more than a quarter century thereafter, Eastview, an extension along an abandoned railway right-of-way, was recommended as a less destructive peripheral route for truck traffic than King Edward in the downtown core. It was in the form of an “interim measure” that King Edward was dealt the full flow of traffic fit for a theoretical freeway before Eastview could share the load (Todesco and Rice 5). Owing in part to the greater clout and afflu- ence of New Edinburgh’s Alliance, the King Edward Avenue Task Force, representing Lowertown, finally lost its bid before the Ontario Municipal Board in 1999 to keep Eastview alive. Currently, King Edward Avenue distinguishes Ottawa traffic by mingling a heavy flow of very large trucks with pedestrians and cyclists in an urban core. King Edward exemplifies how automobile traffic is not simply a story about the car and the bus but also in a critical way a story about the truck. Reliance in North America on the motor truck for transcontinental com- merce has grown over time, along with the size of the trucks. The vast majority of freight is now moved in and out of Ottawa on arterial roads and highways by this method (Gilbert 7). Significantly, in late summer 2009, after harmonizing its policies with that of the United States and Quebec, Ontario opened its roads to vehicles “made up of a tractor pull- ing two full-length semi-trailers up to 40 metres overall length,” citing

Storied Infrastructure | 163 economic benefits, lower fuel consumption costs, and increased safety based entirely on findings from Western Canada and the U.S. (Ontario Ministry of Transportation) (for a countering European perspective, see www.nomegatrucks.eu). These truck trains represent a dramatic shift from the smaller lorries that once ferried freight back and forth over the Ottawa River. They require large, long lanes and wide intersections and produce a threatening passage for pedestrians and cyclists. After an elderly pedestrian was fatally struck and dragged eighteen metres by a truck on King Edward in 2006 and when, a year later, an engineering firm the city was consulting had concluded that a badly needed crosswalk was too dangerous, the King Edward Avenue Task Force arose from five years of abeyance. It sought allies and successfully lobbied the city to conduct a lane reduction study (King Edward, they argued, was about to be narrowed for scheduled repairs anyway). The study suggests, provocatively, that a lane reduction would have only a minimal impact on the level of service (Dillon 34–45). To be sure, the powerful traffic operations branch will not support a reduction of capacity on King Edward without a fight. On the other hand, ever since the first traffic surveys in Canada were conducted in southern Ontario almost a century ago (Davies 124), scientific models of traffic produced by experts have loomed large in contests over street space. In considering a road diet, for all its truck traffic King Edward Avenue still poses a possible counter-example in Ottawa’s narrative of car dependence.

Bronson Avenue Express

Bronson Avenue used to be one of my city’s premier addresses. Bronson was a gracious north-south boulevard lined with grand homes and magnificent trees which cast a shady arch over the street’s entire length. Streetcars whisked quietly up and down each side of the trees. The sidewalks were broad. People strolled along the avenue on a summer evening. Today, Bronson Avenue is a broad, four-lane strip of asphalt lined with battered boarding houses, parking lots and small odd businesses looking for low rents. The houses that have hung on have done so by turning away from Bronson so that they are entered from a side street. High fences have been added to protect the property facing the Bronson side. The fences mimic suburban noise barriers along the traffic sewers we have built in the suburbs and give the street a shuttered, blind feeling. The trees have gone. (Councillor Doucet 50)

164 | Scott [

Figure 4: Two prestressed concrete bridges carry traffic on Bronson Avenue over the Rideau River.

Actually, north Bronson today is a four-lane strip of asphalt. When Bron- son reaches the Rideau Canal, just up the hill from Sunnyside Avenue and Carleton University’s driveway, it becomes a six-lane (forty-four-and-a-half metre) divided expressway to the with off-peak speeds averaging well above the posted seventy kilometres per hour. If four-lane Bronson betrays a “blind feeling” that spurns social interaction, six-lane Bronson Express effectively cuts Carleton out of downtown Ottawa, even though the vibrant neighbourhood of beckons only forty-four-and-a-half metres away. Unlike King Edward, which has fretted since the mid-1980s over a possible road diet, Bronson Avenue tells a story of unabashed faith in the tenets of twentieth-century traffic engineering. It also tells a story of the disproportionate power wielded over traffic by a particular kind of scientific expertise.

Storied Infrastructure | 165 The engineering firm retained in 1990 by the former regional munici- pal government to draw up plans to repair Dunbar Bridge and improve traffic on south Bronson grouped the road’s problems into four evocative categories. First, Dunbar Bridge over Rideau River, by which Bronson morphs into the Aviation Parkway, was suffering from serious “structural deficiencies.” Its reinforced concrete deck was eroding, its tired girders had caused reduced vehicular (and earthquake) loading, and, among other troubles, structural steel damage had weakened its main girder slices, side- walk brackets, and diaphragm plate connections. The bridge was literally falling apart at the seams. Second, “traffic operational deficiencies” beset south Bronson. Dunbar Bridge was too low with respect to “current stan- dards,” causing large trucks to crash into and damage its girders. More critically, “the level of service provided at the Bronson Avenue-Sunnyside Avenue intersection is currently level f” (McCormick and Rankin 10), as in a failure of capacity to meet demand. Third, south Bronson, as a thirty- four-metre wide, undivided four-lane arterial, failed to provide “for future traffic growth,” heaps of which were expected given Carleton’s expansion and the distant southern march of suburban development. Finally, the Bronson Bridge suffered from “environmental deficiencies.” The problems posed to the environment considered by McCormick and Rankin did not relate to the thousands of motor vehicles that Dunbar funneled in and out of the central business district every day. Rather, the traffic engineers had a more invasive species in mind: “The existing bridge has a form of construction which permits roosting of pigeons. This may be contributing significantly to pollution of the Rideau River” (12). By addressing the threat posed by pigeons to Ottawa’s river system, the expan- sion of south Bronson into an expressway satisfied the obligatory class Environmental Assessment. The classea is a planning procedure designed to take into account the potential social, economic, and environmental impacts of a municipal road project. The terms of this assessment clearly not only “balance” but hierarchize imperatives of economy, society, and ecology. These terms were defined by the Municipal Engineers Associa- tion of Ontario and approved by the Ontario Minister of the Environment in 1987. Although Bronson north of the Rideau Canal was spared the free- way treatment inflicted during the 1990s upon its southern trunk, in the spring of 2010 the city began presenting plans to improve its slower half. In addition to replacing century-old sewers and water mains, the city is proposing to widen the avenue by an average of two feet along its length by thinning sidewalks and removing green space. More road, the city

166 | Scott emphasized at the first Public Advisory Committee meeting, meant more room for cyclists and standard widths for an old right-of-way that evolved haphazardly over time. More road also meant, however, that there would be no room for the trees which dotted the architectural drawings, but this could be solved by installing plastic fake trees (which required less space for roots and repelled salt). The city received a generally negative reaction from the public during the first consultation (see http://westside- action.blogspot.com/search/label/Bronson). It has since agreed to install pedestrian lighting at the curb line, which, significantly, reduces “apparent” lane width and promotes a sense of safety among pedestrians, but has not revised the standardized four-lane configuration. The $40-million project to fix north Bronson illustrates the challenge of living up to the city’s transportation master plan, which can be read as Ottawa’s traffic constitution. Area city councilor Diane Holmes, for example, agrees that the Bronson redevelopment plan contradicts the city’s master plan, which places the priorities of pedestrians, cyclists, and transit above that of personal motor vehicles: “The reality is that the [revised plan] is still a four-lane highway mainly for commuters.… We still have a long way to go to redesign Bronson.” Holmes laments that many city engineers still think solely in terms of suburban space “and have probably never read the city’s transportation plan” (Lux). Capital ward councilor Clive Doucet worries, too, that city engineers are not tallying the social costs of extending suburban-style roads into the urban core: “How do you calculate the loss of livable environments?” (50). Together with its speedy southern half, conjoined at the canal, north Bronson illustrates the perils of subverting a hard-fought constitution built on the noble premise of leveling opportunities between privileged and marginalized modes of traffic. Its changing form and function over time shows how, as an object of scientific engineering, traffic on Bronson has become abstracted from the scale and perspective of vibrant, resilient public space.

Terry Fox Drive and Suburban Futures Life’s better here. Set along beautiful ravines, is surrounded by the best that Kanata has to offer—a world class golf course, superb shopping and entertainment, pristine parks and prominent schools. Only minutes from Ottawa’s high tech core and Scotiabank Place. (Urbandale and Richcraft)

Storied Infrastructure | 167 The province has no power to stop the imminent housing development in Kanata’s South March Highlands, even though the area is potential habitat for the threatened Blanding’s turtle —an animal protected under the provincial Endangered Spe- cies Act.… It will involve razing and blasting about 20 hectares of mature forest. (Jaimet)

Figure 5: Beaver Pond Park in South March Highlands, Kanata, Ottawa.

As creatures of the province, Ontario’s municipalities have their hands tied in terms of the pressure to extend sewers, water mains, and automobility into the countryside. Every five years, according to provincial legislation, cities in Ontario update their constitutions to decide how many hectares of farms, woods, and wetlands need to be colonized for shopping malls, roads, and housing starts. On 1 October 2000, for example, when the city enacted Regional Official Plan Amendment 9, Kanata, Ottawa’s western

168 | Scott suburb, ballooned by 725 hectares. Along with South Nepean/Riverside South and Orleans in the east, Kanata represents a failure of the city’s fifty- year-old greenbelt to curb suburban sprawl. Ottawa’s is a strange green- belt. The Gréber Plan successfully wrapped a swath of federally managed green space around postwar Ottawa to give the national capital a rustic motif but also, more practically, to place a limit on urban development. Unfortunately, Gréber’s team significantly underestimated population growth and the power of automobility, and now, a half century after the great decentralization began, 40 percent of Ottawans live outside of the Greenbelt along highway corridors, where most new jobs and housing are expected to sprout (Cross). is not finished yet, but it tells perhaps the most impor- tant story of all about traffic in Canada’s capital city. Oxymoronic, Terry Fox Drive follows a narrative of suburban dreams, of single-occupied vehicles attached to single-detached houses, but also of the destruction of Ottawa’s most densely biodiverse place, the South March Highlands, where the Canadian Shield crops up into an old growth forest home to more than 654 species, seventeen of which face the risk of extinction. In among relatively wealthy neighbourhoods, the road carries heavy expec- tations of future prestige business parks leading an economic comeback of Ottawa’s high-tech sector. Its expansion, along with the widening of a major stretch of Ottawa’s freeway, form central features of the Kanata West Concept Plan (FoTenn). The Concept Plan provides a powerful script for those 725 hectares expropriated by the city in 2000, not necessarily in a legal sense but as a cultural expression of our desire to drive ever forward into brand new spaces rather than double back, take on complex nimbyisms and deficits of affordable housing, andin tensify the extant city, or the city in which we already live. This cultural drive pervades our most basic institutions. The city, always a provincial creature, will likely land in court before the Ontario Municipal Board if it fails to drive ahead and bulldoze South March Highlands into a low-density suburb neatly framed by a $47.7-million extension of Terry Fox. Phase 9 of the Kanata Lakes development may or may not fatally evict the Blanding’s Turtle and American Ginseng. If it does, Ottawa, in addition to having additional roads and housing stock, will have established yet another new normal by which to judge the profound effects of traffic.

Conclusion As Ottawans headed to the municipal polls in the autumn of 2010, traffic again enjoyed the political limelight. Outside of city elections, auto-sector

Storied Infrastructure | 169 insolvency, or new deals for motor vehicle infrastructure, however, traffic rarely becomes a hot political subject. On the other hand, as the price of automobility increasingly imperils global ecology and population health, The over- more and more people may attempt to balance the personal benefits of the car against the ills of car dependence. Problematically, these ills often only whelming become clear at a macro or institutional level, whereas advantages of pri- vate automobility become obvious, for example, after breakfast when your banality of children, screaming for their lunches, need a drive to school and you’re late for work, again. Because of its pervasive insinuation into everyday life, traffic looms traffic, even as something as loud and monumental as motor vehicle traffic, can easily become a routine, taken-for-granted irritant. The overwhelming large over an banality of traffic looms large over an effective politics of automobility. In order to challenge the ways in which automobilities have been system- effective politics atically invested with social currency at the expense of alternative, more sustainable ways of organizing traffic, such a politics must defamiliarize of automobility. our most basic contexts of action. I have argued in this paper that planning stories about automobility can play a large role with respect to casting a light of strangeness over mundane infrastructure. This kind of approach to city space and mobility suggests that cultural studies, and the study of everyday life, may more effectively point toward a different way of living together by including the voices of nonhuman agencies. By taking up traffic, not as some out- come variable tied to an abstract level of service but instead as elaborated through multiple relations of stasis and flow among human and nonhu- man actors, I have tried to show that automobility cannot be described as a predetermined technological outcome. The car clawed and seduced its way into Ottawa, as a form of nation building, to the point where it has become a definitive basis for capital planning. Now it is difficult to imagine life without the car. Restoring a carbon copy of the walkable city of the past built around pre-automobile forms of traffic, to be sure, represents an impossible, reactionary task. Nostalgia aside, many of the most resilient and diverse neighbourhoods in twenty-first-century Canada, certainly in its capital city, were forged in suburbia, a compact suburbia organized around shared streetcar access. By reflecting on old city spaces that became compact and diverse out of necessity, and translating some of their elements into a topical basis for planning traffic, we may yet open a passageway to sustainable mobility.

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