One of the worst things about Sparks Street is that it has given the whole idea of pedestrianized streets a terrible name in Ottawa. In my opinion, a sizeable chunk of the Market should be permanently closed to cars, but people will say “Yeah, because that’s worked so well on Sparks.” It’s infuriating. There isn’t another large city in Canada with such an imagination deficit as Ottawa.
Ottawa is an oddball place. I want to like it, but the city center is always strangely empty. We were in town for a wedding a couple summers ago and walked the entirety of Sparks Street on a beautiful warm Friday evening looking for a restaurant and found nothing except that single pub jammed with government bureaucrats drinking away their sorrows. We just kept walking and walking until we got to the Byward and had a nice meal there.
On Sparks Street I get a vibe of what Toronto's finance district was like when I worked there in the 90s, when all the shops and restaurants shuttered by 4 or 5pm, and then it became a ghost town after mad rush to the Union GO trains. Byward is lively but alarmingly scruffy, like Kensington Market before the hipsterization.
My best theory is that Ottawa is not really a city, and I don't mean that negatively, actually I think it's the reason a lot of Canadians seem to like it, because most Canadians hate big cities. Ottawa is basically a largeish town with enormous suburbs. I know many people who have moved to the area over the years and they have a high quality of life, but they all live in the far suburbs and drive to green spaces for recreation. The city core is just a restaurant destination once in a blue moon, also driven to and from. There's just not enough to give the core the vibrancy a city needs to feel less desolate and be really livable without a car.
And the traffic out to Orleans from the city center or the train station blows my mind every time, and I'm from Toronto. How can it be so bad? And don't get me started on the abysmal process of obtaining a car rental from that train station. At least the LRT provides some options now, when its doors are not frozen shut.
One of the worst things about Sparks Street is that it has given the whole idea of pedestrianized streets a terrible name in Ottawa. In my opinion, a sizeable chunk of the Market should be permanently closed to cars, but people will say “Yeah, because that’s worked so well on Sparks.” It’s infuriating. There isn’t another large city in Canada with such an imagination deficit as Ottawa.
Ottawa is an oddball place. I want to like it, but the city center is always strangely empty. We were in town for a wedding a couple summers ago and walked the entirety of Sparks Street on a beautiful warm Friday evening looking for a restaurant and found nothing except that single pub jammed with government bureaucrats drinking away their sorrows. We just kept walking and walking until we got to the Byward and had a nice meal there.
On Sparks Street I get a vibe of what Toronto's finance district was like when I worked there in the 90s, when all the shops and restaurants shuttered by 4 or 5pm, and then it became a ghost town after mad rush to the Union GO trains. Byward is lively but alarmingly scruffy, like Kensington Market before the hipsterization.
My best theory is that Ottawa is not really a city, and I don't mean that negatively, actually I think it's the reason a lot of Canadians seem to like it, because most Canadians hate big cities. Ottawa is basically a largeish town with enormous suburbs. I know many people who have moved to the area over the years and they have a high quality of life, but they all live in the far suburbs and drive to green spaces for recreation. The city core is just a restaurant destination once in a blue moon, also driven to and from. There's just not enough to give the core the vibrancy a city needs to feel less desolate and be really livable without a car.
And the traffic out to Orleans from the city center or the train station blows my mind every time, and I'm from Toronto. How can it be so bad? And don't get me started on the abysmal process of obtaining a car rental from that train station. At least the LRT provides some options now, when its doors are not frozen shut.