How Strong Towns Ottawa got their Bank Street data

Strong towns Ottawa - Marko Miljusevic 03

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It may not have been on your radar screen, but the City of Ottawa is working on a Bank Street Active Transportation and Transit Priority Feasibility Study for Bank Street in the Glebe. This part of Bank St. is a busy four lane, 1.5 kilometer (just short of a mile) corridor with lots of different things going on: shopping, driving, bussing, cycling, walking, pan handling, delivering. The nearby stadium puts extra pressure on Bank Street at times and future housing developments will increase that pressure on the road even more.

Different interests

As usual, there are many different interests in a busy place like Bank Street. Bus passengers find themselves stuck in traffic and would like to see dedicated bus lanes. Retailers want more parking or at least not less. Pedestrians want to cross streets safely. Drivers just want to drive through.

Strong Towns Ottawa

Strong Towns Ottawa, a loosely organised group of about 400 people from across the National Capital Region, focuses on pushing our city government to become more financially resilient, and to put more focus on designing our streets and roads for the safety of everyone. It describes itself as a non-partisan, grassroots group of citizens that care about seeing our city thrive. Strong Towns Ottawa is very interested in how things are developing on this stretch of Bank St.

After the City released a short summary of the survey, held last summer, they subsequently asked the City for the raw data of the survey. Unfortunately, the City was very hesitant to share the data they gathered, beyond the short summary. Which is too bad, as I strongly believe that if more eyes look at data, the better the discussion will be. Sadly, the City insisted that nothing more would be shared than the shared summary.

“Every single car that is pulling into a parking spot causes long backups of traffic while everyone waits for a single car to parallel park into an open spot, bringing the single travel lane down to a grinding halt. Given that there are so many alternative spots for parking it doesn’t make sense to use all of that valuable space for the storage of personal vehicles.” – Strong Towns Ottawa

Over 2700 responses

After not receiving responses anymore, Strong Towns asked a city councillor for help getting the data. Wouldn’t you know, all of a sudden they did receive the raw data, albeit in a PDF of over 2700 responses, each on a separate page, instead of sending a spreadsheet that you would expect any organisation would have; it was an online survey after all. The data was sent in a horrible format. I even know how to set that up in, say, Google Forms and did so already when Bike Ottawa gathered information on cycling ideas from potential city councillors back in 2014 or so. The city must have had it in a more accessible file like a database or a spreadsheet. If not, that is very worrisome.

Unprocessed data

So now Strong Towns Ottawa sat on this pile of unprocessed data. But then something awesome happened. The document was shared among several members. Within half a day, someone wrote a script that scraped all the data from the enormous PDF file and brought it into a spreadsheet. Now, the data could be sorted very quickly. Two other members stepped in and created an infographic that you can see below.

What do the 2797 responses show?

61% of the respondents walk, bike or buses to Bank Street, only 20% drive there.

Of those who arrive by car, the vast majority is willing to walk between 5 minutes up to even over 10 minutes to a destination on Bank Street in the Glebe, indicating that parking a bit further away is not an issue at all.

Top of the list of desired improvements on Bank St in the survey is not more cars or more parking. Instead, people want to see wider sidewalks, benches and trees and bus and bicycle lanes. Before your neighbour starts to rant about the all powerful bike lobby in City Hall (there isn’t by the way), the most desired improvement indicated by respondents is bus lanes. If we lump bus lanes, wider sidewalks and bike lanes into one category, we are looking at 74.1% of respondents who ask for one or more of these changes.

There is enough parking

The case that Strong Towns Ottawa tries to make is, that there is a lot of parking around Bank Street, off the main drag, and that existing parking, such as the parking garage on Third Avenue and the parking at Lansdowne is underutilised. Removing parking for bus lanes -even at certain times of the day only- would improve transit through Bank St. while it won’t make a difference in visitors, Strong Towns Ottawa believes.

In the Ottawa Citizen of July 27 2024, Strong Towns Ottawa argues that parking on that portion of Bank Street constitutes “only seven per cent” of the total of approximately 2,000 available paid spots in the stretch from the Queensway to Lansdowne Park, including the underground parkade at TD Place, but that 7% is ultimately responsible for the slow crawl of traffic through that area. Removing parking from that stretch of Bank is in their opinion a simple solution that goes a long way to improve traffic on Bank St.

Careful with online polling

Now, I am the first one to mention that online surveys might be slanted because of its nature. Even someone from Auckland, New Zealand might be able to fill it out. IP addresses should give some hints, if those are recorded. But even then, you don’t really know who is answering the survey. The link to a survey is often shared among like minded people, so those who want a change might be more active in filling out the survey.

On the other hand, there might be a contra movement that could also share the link among their own like minded folks. The only way to really find out how people arrive and what they think, is having people out in the street with clipboards/tablets (remember slate was a word for tablets?) to conduct exit polls at businesses.

More parking vs better shopping experiences

This has been done in the past, I believe in Little Italy, and -although quite a while ago- I seem to remember large numbers of people said they arrived by foot. Another study, from Edinburgh, Scotland (image below), showed that retailers assumed customers wanted to have more parking, while in reality customers wanted to have wider sidewalks and nicer shop windows. For the record, members of Strong Towns Ottawa were out on Bank Street with a booth asking people for their opinions and raising awareness.

Yet, given the large number of responses, there is certainly something to learn from those data. The city has not shared more plans yet, but I heard we can expect that in spring 2025. My guess is that not much will change, especially because no major changes are promised. I don’t expect wider sidewalks or separate bike lanes, at the most we’ll see extended hours for bus lanes, but then there is always that person who just needs to drop something off and leaves their car in the bus lane for: “Only a minute!”

It is good to remember that other roads, like Churchill Ave, saw a road diet as did Main Street. Avid drivers may complain about the lack of traffic flow on Main, but the area has become a lot more civilised.

Use the skills

I would like to highlight here the volunteer knowledge and skills that are out there. Here are people who like to look at the data and play with it, but the City basically stonewalls their enthusiasm. Strong Towns had to ask for the data several times and eventually had to go through a city councillor’s office to receive them. That’s not good. If you want engagement, you can’t just throw up an engagement web survey and then make it really difficult for enthusiastic residents with great skills to work with data. That sure doesn’t create engaging voters.

More information on the Strong Towns Ottawa website. The City of Ottawa has an 11 page Powerpoint presentation on the Amazon servers here.