Reimagining Downtown: Bicycles instead of buses [The Ottawa Citizen]

A working document that imagines a remaking of downtown Ottawa — after the rail system replaces 2,000 of the 2,600 bus trips currently made each day through the city core — proposes a dense network of segregated bicycle lanes on every major artery, shared bike and pedestrian routes on some roads, and many painted bike lanes on others.

Photograph by: Jean Levac , The Ottawa Citizen

OTTAWA — When the underground light-rail system takes most of the transit load off the city’s streets, it’s going to free up a lot of pavement — and the city’s trying to decide what to do with all that room. A big part of the answer: bicycles.
A working document that imagines a remaking of downtown Ottawa — after the rail system replaces 2,000 of the 2,600 bus trips currently made each day through the city core — proposes a dense network of segregated bicycle lanes on every major artery, shared bike and pedestrian routes on some roads, and many painted bike lanes on others.
The vision, called Downtown Moves, is many months from becoming official city policy, but planners are clearly excited, according to emails released to the Citizen under access-to-information legislation.
“In summary, if all these things were built we will definitely succeed in attracting large numbers of additional cyclists to downtown and getting tons of bums out of cars,” says one email from January, written by Robin Bennett, a project manager for cycling programs.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Reimagining+Downtown+Bicycles+instead+buses/6729003/story.html#ixzz1x4VNBEca