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As an urban society, we have to shift our focus away from exclusively serving motor vehicles as the norm, and towards serving people, regardless of the mode they use.
Say you want to give directions to visit you. Giving driving instructions is quite straight forward. Take Albert Street to Bronson then turn right… etc etc. Roads have names because people can remember them, sort them, and keep things somewhat straight.
Now try giving instructions to your house using pedestrian and cycling paths: “Well, just past the bridge over the railway tracks, take the unpaved path on the right, the one under the hydro pylons, and follow it till you get to the fifth path that runs off to the left and follow it to get to my street. And don’t take the fourth or sixth turn-off, or you will never get here.”
After all, we would never think of building streets without naming them, but we build paths without names. This lack of names denies them legitimacy. We name everything in our language; pundits and academics delight in putting a new name on some new trend or discovery. So why aren’t people demanding names for our paths? Especially with 9-1-1 service being geographically address based, knowing a location is a matter of vital urban safety as well as a convenience.
A few years ago I started lobbying for a proper off-road bike and pedestrian path along the north side of Albert and Scott Streets, from Bronson to Churchill. I got tired of waving my hands in the air every time I tried to describe where it is, and coined the name BikeWest. The word was adopted by the politicians and planners almost immediately. By branding the path, and the concept of improving it, BikeWest got a life. It got respect. It became real. Now you won’t find the name on a City map yet, but lots of planners and people know where it is.
And names are important. I am not a fan of numbering pedestrian and cycling paths or routes. If a route follows Bank Street, we don’t need it to have a second identify as “bike route 17”. For routes that follow a maze of different streets, or run separate from streets, we do need a unique name.
Quite simply, every bike path and walking path should have a distinct name. Preferably a name that identifies where it is or gives a clue about where it goes. These could be directional (BikeWest) or by neighborhood (Little Italy, Westboro).
We would never think of building streets without street signs, but we don’t hesitate to build pedestrian and cycling paths without signs. We don’t have signs because most paths lack names. And that which is unworthy of a name is unworthy of respect, of being used in daily discourse, or being useful.
But without names, there is no easy way to identify a path. It is even worse if you are on it, and come to a street corner or intersection. Where it meets a cross street, the City will put up street signs for even the shortest little dead end. Motorists need to know where they are. But if you arrive via footpath or cycle path, apparently the City either believes that you don’t deserve to know where you are, or that you will somehow divine your location by osmosis.
Every time a path meets another, it should be sign posted. And every time a side path runs off to a local street, sign it! It is accepted that providing such signing, for motorists, is simply a normal cost of running a city. But why only for motorists?
Fortunately, we have the NCC giving us a taste of what should be done –– see the green signs in the slideshow above. A number of the NCC’s main pathways do have names, with occasional signs identifying them, but the path names are not yet widely recognized.
The NCC signs sometimes show streets, or attractions, or path names, or two of the three — just as we have come to expect in signage for drivers. These signs reassure users they are on the correct route, how far it is to their destination, etc. Still, not all NCC pathways have these signs, and the ones that do are not consistent in what they show.
Even better would be numbered posts every tenth of a kilometer on greenway trails (they can do it on highways…) or putting up house-style numbers on each lamp post along the urban routes. If there is an accident, if someone is lost, if someone wonders how far they have to go, a glance at the nearest post would put them on the 9-1-1 map.
As a society we have a century of figuring out how to name and sign streets and install wayfinding signage for motorists. It is time to assign names to paths, then hand the job over to the City sign department who should develop appropriate signage standards and vocabulary.
6 comments
Speaking from a highly prejudiced POV, I’m in complete agreement on this point. Some names do suggest themselves, and you might want to add to your list of those pathways the case of the pathway encircling the Apollo Park Crater in Orléans.
Now…speaking of signage to mark these paths, a question: what’s the standard typeface for city street signage at the moment?
I agree wholeheartedly with Eric. To add to the name issue, we in Hintonburg are desperately trying to get the city to give addresses and proper signage to the neighbourhood parks. Emergencies demand a name and an address to enter and so – as Eric as ably pointed out – so do our well used paths. Thanks Eric!
I agree with many of the points, but the name “Cyclopiste de Preston” feels like nails on a chalkboard. Some additional anecdotes:
The NCC didn’t get serious about signage until the Ardeth Wood incident in 2003. After that, people were paranoid of going on the paths, the Pathway Patrol expanded from 40 to 170 volunteers, and the police were giving seminars (geared toward women but generally accessible) on how to use your bike to defend yourself against an attacker.
I seem to recall something about signage every 100 metres, but I don’t recall whatever came of that idea. It’s definitely not easy to read those signs.
As for directional signage, the yellow line often takes you to where you want to go: for example, as you’re going along the Ottawa River past the War Museum toward Parliament Hill, follow the solid line and it will take you along the winding path that twice crossed under Wellington.
However, after training cyclists to counterintuitively trust the yellow line, they’ve breached it: if you’re going northbound along the Rideau Canal under the Laurier Bridge on the uOttawa side, following the yellow line takes you to a dead-end path under the bridge, and you have to ride down the steep cobbled slope of the bridge abutments to get back to the real path which continues along the path.
The green signs that the NCC *does* post have really small print, and it’s hard to make out exactly what you’re looking at. If you’ve ever had to report a tree fallen over a path to the NCC’s phone line, you’d might as well be talking in braille. Even for ones that do have names, there is no convenient distinction between the “Ottawa River Pathway” that is on the North side of the parkway and the one on the South.
It’s long been a bugaboo of mine that the NCC’s free “Capital Pathways” map only shows you the general shape of the pathways. You can see that a green pathway connects up with a white city street, but neither is named so unless you already know where you are going, the map is useless.
When I was headed down to Industrial Avenue during Doors Open Ottawa a couple weekends ago, after I crossed the former train bridge over the Rideau River (near the U of O’s Lees campus which they bought from Algonquin College), I wasn’t sure which of the spaghetti of pathways on the east side of the river would take me to Industrial. There was a map posted right at the bridge, but aside from being covered with graffiti, the map showed downtown, and indicated that you were at the very east edge of it. Again useless for anyone trying to go East.
Although i’d heartily support signage / #’s / long/lat or whatever to help people get around on bikes, i’d point out that a lot of japan has no street signage. i believe even england or france have many places with just names of houses instead of numbers.
there’s a historical tie to knowing where you are going, and if you don’t then ask a local as we often did. the people dimension is often forgotten.
or you can do like we did at times on our bikes in japan, just use a map applcaition ( we used “offmaps” a lot as it preloads maps from wifi thus avoiding wireless charges).
places and cities are about people and history, not just numbers.
The 9/11 system must be run by morons.
We have to scrape the maps clean of any conceivable “duplicate” or “confusing” street names – how do they cope in a metropolitan area like London, where they might be a dozen “duplicates”? And then give civic addresses to parks, which often front on more than one street (or back onto non-streets) entirely, with the sign giving the “civic address” often a long distance away, and unknown even to frequent users of the parks. Surely the emergency services should, and must, be able to cope with a 9/11 call placed by a frantic person who knows they are in New Edinburgh Park or at Britannia Beach, but no more than that.