Downtown Moves: Transforming Ottawa's Streets supports reinvestment in Ottawa's downtown streets to foster a lively, world-class, Capital City.
The six-phase process engaged the public in workshops, focus groups and a 'Mobility Summit' lecture series that resulted in community-led key directions to guide the streetscape, urban design and infrastructure renewal of approximately 30 km of municipal streets. Downtown Moves developed a new 'Street Design Decision-Making Framework' to guide and simplify decision-making on the design of downtown streets and public spaces, and pioneered research into the concept of "Pedestrian Level-of-Service" (LOS), a measure that ranks pedestrian comfort and freedom of movement on a six-level scale.
The final report provides guidelines and strategies to reinvigorate the quality and character of downtown streets, including prioritizing pedestrians, fostering a healthy and green urban environment, improving the cycling network and encouraging transit use by implementing new transit-interchange zones. Downtown Moves was unanimously approved by the City of Ottawa's Transportation Committee and subsequently by City Council, and has also informed the City on its 5-year review of the Official Plan, Infrastructure Master Plan and Transportation Master Plan.
