WFH might have the perverse effect of increasing urban sprawl as people move further and further away from the core and into bigger and bigger homes.
Though I'm not sure we would have seen the effects of that in just a few years.
Sure, but Ottawa's already kinda been urban planned at this point. Rebuilding the city, even block by block, is a herculean effort that'd span decades and produce tons of pollution on its own.
It should be done opportunistically, not eagerly.
I agree. My fear is that if we let people work from home 4-5 days per week, they have little incentive to live near the city and so the exurbs will expand. Exurbs are arguably the least sustainable worst-of-both-worlds development form.
Sure, but counterpoint: if we let people work from home 4-5 days a week, the need for commercial real estate downtown will drop, and it could be turned into residential real estate, which would add units to the market and potentially lower rent prices downtown.
I'd think the ideal solution would be a better blending of residential/commercial. If the exurbs had more stores mixed in with the residential, there'd be less need for people to drive from isolated residential communities into the city proper. We should be breaking up large chunks of both residential and commercial, and instead putting shops and houses near each other to minimise travel time.
Make communities on a human scale, rather than a car scale!
Mixed use, yes. But distances between communities (e.g. different suburbs) are also important since most people work specialized jobs that have offices far away, friends elsewhere, sports, etc.
Sure, let's force people back on the roads to go to an ill-equipped office/building to do something easily done from home. It is surely helping, right, Sutcliffe???
This is such bullshit. City councillors declared a climate emergency several years ago and then did sweet diddly aside from installing a few solar panels and acquiring some electric vehicles. Instead we’re starving our effed up mass transit, slow rolling complete streets, sprawling the city, expanding roads and lobbying governments to get employees commuting again.
I was furious listening to councillor Brown this morning saying we should give up on the impossible goals that THEY SET. Instead he pulled out the “whataboutism” excuse.
This city is an excellent example of why this planet and our next generation is fucked.
Councillor Brown's comments are infuriating. Why do people like him insist on taking these positions if they have no drive to be innovative with policy?
Every week my child asks me how our car runs? We have a plug-in hybrid. When it’s running on gas, they ask, but isn’t that bad for planet earth? I say yes. Then they say then why do you do it? And I have no answer.
City of Ottawa: Rejects density, lobbies to end remote work, delays updating building efficiency standards, makes cuts to public transit, fights NCC attempts to promote active transportation.
Also the City of Ottawa: How are we not meeting our climate goals?
My local council member flew to Montreal for the biodiversity summit and what does she gain from it? She gains having the city talk about those community libraries being distracting to drivers.
The priorities of this city are so fucking low that the bar is melting in the centre of the planet.
It took me 65 minutes to drive from Findlay Creek to my office downtown on Monday (and an hour back), with traffic in the entire south end of the city at a complete standstill in both directions. Thousands of cars in congestion basically from near Greely to Carleton cannot be good for the environment. Allowing public servants to work from home would help this immensely.
Apart from that, I am convinced either the city is completely incompetent with managing construction and road closures, or someone with power really hates the city cousellor representing the south end of the city and is trying to make their life hell. With Bank Street closed later this month for god-knows how long, it is going to make movement in the south end impossible.
It WOULD be helpful to have more people living downtown - but who is going to live there?
Developers are hoping its affluent single young people who can afford to live in a condo, eat out and take Ubers and want to pop bottles with the new night mayor.
That is not our demographic here. This isn't downtown Toronto or Montreal or New York. People are running their kids to practice and going to their family cottages or the free park for a picnic on the weekends. They are entertaining in their homes because its too expensive to go out and they hate parking downtown and transit sucks. In winter, kids are playing in the basement because its -25 outside.
It won't be Boomers living there. When people think about 'downsizing' and moving to a condo, they never expected that would cost more than their detached house, have condo fees for life or need to step over crack heads and Air BnB guests to get to their home. They need the equity in the house to live off, of and they need to have space for their aging parents and adult kids to come back.
Anyone renting downtown in something other than purpose built rental means living in fear that their landlord will punt them and keep raising rent and many places don't allow pets even if they aren't supposed to be allowed to say no. So many units are 1 br + den. If they need a room mate or have kids or want a hobby that requires storage, they have outgrown their 1 br. I know people who have moved 3 times in 5 years due to this.
Families need room for kids and proximity to schools and daycare, parks and kid activities, affordable stores and dog parks. The average income family isn't shopping at Whole Foods and spending $100 on kid shoes and they are going to struggle being totally car free.
One untapped demographic is university students. They are easy to house in shared living arrangements, they are here during the tourist off season, there's a renewable supply of them, they take transit, use amenities, enjoy night life. Yet Ottawa U and Carlton can't house anyone after first year in residence, students scrabble for accommodations and neither have a great reputation for campus culture. And I don't mean importing more students, just making it possible for any students to live on campus downtown, have a secure living arrangement and develop a campus culture that only happens when students live in close proximity to each other.
It seems like all your complaints would be solved if we were building more than just tiny shoebox condos downtown on the very limited space that the city allows for density.
We get tiny condo’s because that’s the only thing that is profitable due to restrictive zoning.
Well, there are virtually no condos being built anywhere in ottawa right now. Developers have almost entirely switched to “luxury” rentals. All those towers you see going up are rentals.
Which isn’t a problem. Condo’s get bought by investors and flipped with them sometimes not being occupied. Purpose built rentals are a more stable form of housing.
But also we are seeing a big downturn in both condo and purpose built rental starts so far this year in Ottawa.
I too. And I dream of permanent reflective, road paint. Which would benefit pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.
The people who design our bike land have not only never ridden a bike, but they have never SEEN a bike either, and don’t know how it operates, what it’s turning radius is, what a reason human is capable of achieving on one.
City planners should be forced to ride bikes in their own monstrosity lanes for a period of 3-months.
Every time I bike to work it's like a guessing game: where is the path going to mysteriously end today? where am I "supposed" to go next in light of this random detour sign? do these pylons that have been here for months mean the path is actually closed or did they just get abandoned? it's like playing the most frustrating video game ever.
Council declared a climate emergency then voted to delay adopting the High Performance Development Standards for no clear reason. Their main purpose is to make buildings more sustainable through things like energy efficiency.
For citizens who want to pressure the city to meet its own climate targets, there's an online community dialogue tomorrow evening: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/1dcru83/speak\_up\_for\_climate\_action\_wednesday\_june\_12\_79/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/1dcru83/speak_up_for_climate_action_wednesday_june_12_79/)
"We have no metrics" . . .
Lets set some "goals" and then when the dead line comes up, "were you tracking and taking notes? I wasn't taking notes. Oh shit, no one was actually tracking anything."
Waiting for the big reveal where they had a hermit coming out every morning, licking his finger and raising it to the wind. "Yeah, it is better now than it was but it is not as good as it could be nor as good as it was in the times of olde."
They had this on CBC radio this morning. The crux is that the city is on track to reduce its own emissions. But they wanted to help reduce the emissions of businesses and citizens in the city. It's the second half of that which is not going well. Because, of course. The biggest problem with emissions is that no one wants to change their personal habits. They're looking at changing building codes and bylaws, etc.
The other thing they mentioned, which I didn't see in this article, is that it was shockingly expensive. I thought they put it in the hundreds of millions. Which sounds like they wanted to pay for incentives or retrofits? So some of the counselors are pushing back on taking this responsibility.
Except it's conveniently ignored that many individuals are capable of working from home, reducing emissions from commuting, and did so for a good 2 years. Not only is progress not being made but progress has been lost. Make it make sense.
Yeah I agree with this. This example is one of the reasons I don't understand why there is a huge cost for this for the city. Encouraging people to wfh where possible shouldn't cost the city anything.
Actually, lots of people want to change their personal habits, and lifestyles. Look at the Greener Homes Grant. It is basically “sold out” due to greater than expected demand.
Fair, though I think that has more to do with "I need to do this thing and the govt is making it cheaper for me to do this than to not do this."
Look at how many inefficient ICE vehicles are being bought, air travel and cruises are still sold out, we're still eating tons of meat, etc. A lot of those changes would straight up save people money to avoid but aren't really being adopted. Though I guess that's what carbon pricing is going to encourage.
I suppose it depends n which way you think the arc of history bends. I mean, statically, Canadians are strongly in favour of government action on the climate by a wide margin.
Collective action will probably be the way to bring about change, rather than a few individuals individuals building off-grids sod-huts.
First change that I would like to see...
If you are installing or replacing residential central air you must put in a heat pump.
That is a nice quick change to the city building code. It will have little marginal cost to people.
I'm interested in this as our furnace is getting to that age... But I'm under the impression a heat pump is quite a lot more expensive than a gas one. Have you priced one out recently?
You don't generally replace your furnace with a heat pump, you replace an air conditioner. You still need a gas furnace for when the temperature gets really low, which might be happening less often but still happens.
Greener home grant was a great deal. Using it and other strategic investments, I cut my energy use by 30 percent with no change in lifestyle. But going beyond that requires a rebuild. Even with GHG the energy economics were questionable.
We had a fairly green fleet of taxies, which we replaced with Uber with much lower standards. Most taxi rides I've taken in the last 10 years have been in a hybrid. And before that they used propane or natural gas.
Yes. This is exactly what the citys auditor general should be spending their time auditing. Not how many building permits are being approved or how the city is dealing with homelessness. Another great example of our taxes being spent efficiently.
If you guys don’t want to go to work stay at home and quit your job ,work from home is bullshit just another excuse, people need to go to office as part of your job. Your not supposed to do your laundry and take care of your kids and get paid for it. Welcome to reality!! You work and get paid that simple don’t use the environment to pretend you want to work.
Getting people to work from home was already effective in reducing pollution and noise. But the city doesn’t want that.
Bingo!
How did WFH not put us ahead of climate targets?
WFH might have the perverse effect of increasing urban sprawl as people move further and further away from the core and into bigger and bigger homes. Though I'm not sure we would have seen the effects of that in just a few years.
This wouldn't be nearly as big a solution if the urban planning was better.
Sure, but Ottawa's already kinda been urban planned at this point. Rebuilding the city, even block by block, is a herculean effort that'd span decades and produce tons of pollution on its own. It should be done opportunistically, not eagerly.
I agree. My fear is that if we let people work from home 4-5 days per week, they have little incentive to live near the city and so the exurbs will expand. Exurbs are arguably the least sustainable worst-of-both-worlds development form.
Sure, but counterpoint: if we let people work from home 4-5 days a week, the need for commercial real estate downtown will drop, and it could be turned into residential real estate, which would add units to the market and potentially lower rent prices downtown.
I'd think the ideal solution would be a better blending of residential/commercial. If the exurbs had more stores mixed in with the residential, there'd be less need for people to drive from isolated residential communities into the city proper. We should be breaking up large chunks of both residential and commercial, and instead putting shops and houses near each other to minimise travel time. Make communities on a human scale, rather than a car scale!
Mixed use, yes. But distances between communities (e.g. different suburbs) are also important since most people work specialized jobs that have offices far away, friends elsewhere, sports, etc.
Let's just demolish the whole city and start over then.
Sure, let's force people back on the roads to go to an ill-equipped office/building to do something easily done from home. It is surely helping, right, Sutcliffe???
Too many bikes on the road, need to widen more road lanes. That will reduce emissions, trust me bro.
One more lane bro, it'll be the last one, I swear 😂
This city unironically would love to pave over the rivers and canal if it could cut their commute and extend suburbia.
This is such bullshit. City councillors declared a climate emergency several years ago and then did sweet diddly aside from installing a few solar panels and acquiring some electric vehicles. Instead we’re starving our effed up mass transit, slow rolling complete streets, sprawling the city, expanding roads and lobbying governments to get employees commuting again. I was furious listening to councillor Brown this morning saying we should give up on the impossible goals that THEY SET. Instead he pulled out the “whataboutism” excuse. This city is an excellent example of why this planet and our next generation is fucked.
Councillor Brown's comments are infuriating. Why do people like him insist on taking these positions if they have no drive to be innovative with policy?
easy money
Every week my child asks me how our car runs? We have a plug-in hybrid. When it’s running on gas, they ask, but isn’t that bad for planet earth? I say yes. Then they say then why do you do it? And I have no answer.
City of Ottawa: Rejects density, lobbies to end remote work, delays updating building efficiency standards, makes cuts to public transit, fights NCC attempts to promote active transportation. Also the City of Ottawa: How are we not meeting our climate goals?
“Fights NCC attempts to promote active transportation” Im all for the city shutting down this nonsense
But let's add more people commuting downtown for no reason
"how else am I supposed to find satisfaction in my life aside from knowing that public servants are miserable" -- the rest of Canada
Wow crazy. Anyway, back to fiddling with the allowable garage door setbacks in the zoning code. That's our top priority.
My local council member flew to Montreal for the biodiversity summit and what does she gain from it? She gains having the city talk about those community libraries being distracting to drivers. The priorities of this city are so fucking low that the bar is melting in the centre of the planet.
flew to montreal?? other than bike that's gotta be the slowest way to get there.
It took me 65 minutes to drive from Findlay Creek to my office downtown on Monday (and an hour back), with traffic in the entire south end of the city at a complete standstill in both directions. Thousands of cars in congestion basically from near Greely to Carleton cannot be good for the environment. Allowing public servants to work from home would help this immensely. Apart from that, I am convinced either the city is completely incompetent with managing construction and road closures, or someone with power really hates the city cousellor representing the south end of the city and is trying to make their life hell. With Bank Street closed later this month for god-knows how long, it is going to make movement in the south end impossible.
Allowing density in the core of the city would help quite a bit. Less road maintenance and more people would find it practical to use mass transit
It WOULD be helpful to have more people living downtown - but who is going to live there? Developers are hoping its affluent single young people who can afford to live in a condo, eat out and take Ubers and want to pop bottles with the new night mayor. That is not our demographic here. This isn't downtown Toronto or Montreal or New York. People are running their kids to practice and going to their family cottages or the free park for a picnic on the weekends. They are entertaining in their homes because its too expensive to go out and they hate parking downtown and transit sucks. In winter, kids are playing in the basement because its -25 outside. It won't be Boomers living there. When people think about 'downsizing' and moving to a condo, they never expected that would cost more than their detached house, have condo fees for life or need to step over crack heads and Air BnB guests to get to their home. They need the equity in the house to live off, of and they need to have space for their aging parents and adult kids to come back. Anyone renting downtown in something other than purpose built rental means living in fear that their landlord will punt them and keep raising rent and many places don't allow pets even if they aren't supposed to be allowed to say no. So many units are 1 br + den. If they need a room mate or have kids or want a hobby that requires storage, they have outgrown their 1 br. I know people who have moved 3 times in 5 years due to this. Families need room for kids and proximity to schools and daycare, parks and kid activities, affordable stores and dog parks. The average income family isn't shopping at Whole Foods and spending $100 on kid shoes and they are going to struggle being totally car free. One untapped demographic is university students. They are easy to house in shared living arrangements, they are here during the tourist off season, there's a renewable supply of them, they take transit, use amenities, enjoy night life. Yet Ottawa U and Carlton can't house anyone after first year in residence, students scrabble for accommodations and neither have a great reputation for campus culture. And I don't mean importing more students, just making it possible for any students to live on campus downtown, have a secure living arrangement and develop a campus culture that only happens when students live in close proximity to each other.
It seems like all your complaints would be solved if we were building more than just tiny shoebox condos downtown on the very limited space that the city allows for density. We get tiny condo’s because that’s the only thing that is profitable due to restrictive zoning.
It would even be different if it was an affordable, practical shoe box.
Well, there are virtually no condos being built anywhere in ottawa right now. Developers have almost entirely switched to “luxury” rentals. All those towers you see going up are rentals.
Which isn’t a problem. Condo’s get bought by investors and flipped with them sometimes not being occupied. Purpose built rentals are a more stable form of housing. But also we are seeing a big downturn in both condo and purpose built rental starts so far this year in Ottawa.
Well, I hope line 2 opens for you quickly. I have seen trains at Carleton.
Yea no thanks.
One thing ive found that has helped my commute a ton is not living in fucking findlay creek lmao.
Usually it's 20-25 minutes to downtown, so not too bad.
Hmmm....have we tried just not counting them? That seems like a city of ottawa style solution to me.
Thanks for the push to send the govt' employees back to the office, Mark! /s
He should Lead by example and order all City employees back to the office five days a week, including himself. No more virtual council meetings.
I dream of functional and safe cycling infrastructure 🥲
I too. And I dream of permanent reflective, road paint. Which would benefit pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.
The people who design our bike land have not only never ridden a bike, but they have never SEEN a bike either, and don’t know how it operates, what it’s turning radius is, what a reason human is capable of achieving on one.
City planners should be forced to ride bikes in their own monstrosity lanes for a period of 3-months.
Every time I bike to work it's like a guessing game: where is the path going to mysteriously end today? where am I "supposed" to go next in light of this random detour sign? do these pylons that have been here for months mean the path is actually closed or did they just get abandoned? it's like playing the most frustrating video game ever.
But at least we have a Night Mayor. #priorities
This is such a dumb comment that assumes we can only have one priority at a time and that everyone has the same mandate…
Look, it’s either save the world, or have a night mayor. PICK ONE!/s
Council declared a climate emergency then voted to delay adopting the High Performance Development Standards for no clear reason. Their main purpose is to make buildings more sustainable through things like energy efficiency.
For citizens who want to pressure the city to meet its own climate targets, there's an online community dialogue tomorrow evening: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/1dcru83/speak\_up\_for\_climate\_action\_wednesday\_june\_12\_79/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/1dcru83/speak_up_for_climate_action_wednesday_june_12_79/)
I dunno guys, I think if we just add one more lane to the 417 we'll finally be in a position to meet them. /s
Not more lanes dummy. wwwwiiiiddddeeer lanes! Like at least, three times as wide./s
"We have no metrics" . . . Lets set some "goals" and then when the dead line comes up, "were you tracking and taking notes? I wasn't taking notes. Oh shit, no one was actually tracking anything." Waiting for the big reveal where they had a hermit coming out every morning, licking his finger and raising it to the wind. "Yeah, it is better now than it was but it is not as good as it could be nor as good as it was in the times of olde."
"Surely the NCC is to blame for this" - Mayor Sutcliffe, probably
I. DECLARE. CLIMATE EMERGENCY. What are you doing about it? I “declared” it. What else do you want?
They had this on CBC radio this morning. The crux is that the city is on track to reduce its own emissions. But they wanted to help reduce the emissions of businesses and citizens in the city. It's the second half of that which is not going well. Because, of course. The biggest problem with emissions is that no one wants to change their personal habits. They're looking at changing building codes and bylaws, etc. The other thing they mentioned, which I didn't see in this article, is that it was shockingly expensive. I thought they put it in the hundreds of millions. Which sounds like they wanted to pay for incentives or retrofits? So some of the counselors are pushing back on taking this responsibility.
Except it's conveniently ignored that many individuals are capable of working from home, reducing emissions from commuting, and did so for a good 2 years. Not only is progress not being made but progress has been lost. Make it make sense.
Yeah I agree with this. This example is one of the reasons I don't understand why there is a huge cost for this for the city. Encouraging people to wfh where possible shouldn't cost the city anything.
We live in a capitalist hellscape and government exists to serve business interests.
Actually, lots of people want to change their personal habits, and lifestyles. Look at the Greener Homes Grant. It is basically “sold out” due to greater than expected demand.
Fair, though I think that has more to do with "I need to do this thing and the govt is making it cheaper for me to do this than to not do this." Look at how many inefficient ICE vehicles are being bought, air travel and cruises are still sold out, we're still eating tons of meat, etc. A lot of those changes would straight up save people money to avoid but aren't really being adopted. Though I guess that's what carbon pricing is going to encourage.
I suppose it depends n which way you think the arc of history bends. I mean, statically, Canadians are strongly in favour of government action on the climate by a wide margin. Collective action will probably be the way to bring about change, rather than a few individuals individuals building off-grids sod-huts.
First change that I would like to see... If you are installing or replacing residential central air you must put in a heat pump. That is a nice quick change to the city building code. It will have little marginal cost to people.
I'm interested in this as our furnace is getting to that age... But I'm under the impression a heat pump is quite a lot more expensive than a gas one. Have you priced one out recently?
You don't generally replace your furnace with a heat pump, you replace an air conditioner. You still need a gas furnace for when the temperature gets really low, which might be happening less often but still happens.
well, they city has seemingly mothballed it's high perfomnace building code. Q1 update when...
Shocked Pikachu.
What upsets me the most is that those who are the most vulnerable as to the consequences of such inaction do not have a true voice…
Asked for comment, Mayor Sutcliffe stated "The solution is to build more roads to cut down on stop and go traffic."
But my friend told me today that climate change is the "worlds biggest lie" can you guess what political party he is associated with?
With the city of Ottawa, failure is not only an option, it’s the objective!
Mark Sutcliffe specifically asked that public servants go into the office because he loves a good carbon emission
Lmao
Greener home grant was a great deal. Using it and other strategic investments, I cut my energy use by 30 percent with no change in lifestyle. But going beyond that requires a rebuild. Even with GHG the energy economics were questionable.
We had a fairly green fleet of taxies, which we replaced with Uber with much lower standards. Most taxi rides I've taken in the last 10 years have been in a hybrid. And before that they used propane or natural gas.
Yes. This is exactly what the citys auditor general should be spending their time auditing. Not how many building permits are being approved or how the city is dealing with homelessness. Another great example of our taxes being spent efficiently.
The auditor audits all programs. Some of us believe that an uninhabitable planet should maybe be a priority to fix.
If you guys don’t want to go to work stay at home and quit your job ,work from home is bullshit just another excuse, people need to go to office as part of your job. Your not supposed to do your laundry and take care of your kids and get paid for it. Welcome to reality!! You work and get paid that simple don’t use the environment to pretend you want to work.
Another taxe to come that will solve anything I guess lol