Why Don't We Cover the Sidewalks?

1-09-2018

I live in Ottawa, Canada, a place known for its harsh winters, and so far, the present winter has been the worst yet (or maybe I have never been so old before). In December, we got end-of-January weather a month in advance, and if this is Canadian-style extreme weather, indirectly related to climate change, then there is more and worse to come.

I am a public transit user with no personal car, and I found conditions imprisoning. You can only cocoon for so long, and then you need to go and buy groceries. In my case, this involved a fifteen minute walk, under conditions that made a fifteen-minute walk onerous. This collective ordeal lasted for a full week at least, without a break.

Sheltering in the lobby of a restaurant with my bags of groceries and looking out the window, I watched the bundled-up young people go by on the sidewalk with looks of outright pain on their frost-punished faces. Not a good advertisement for old Ottawa.

Why don't we cover the sidewalks?

Cover them, and heat the resulting enclosed spaces in the winter and air-condition them in the summer. Don't ask me how; I'm not a civil engineer. To aid in the execution phase, we have the creative, young minds at Algonquin College. They have a Center for Construction Excellence right there.

Make the project a multi-generational effort, to be advanced incrementally as cash flow permits, like the way they built the great cathedrals of Europe. The many benefits would likewise increase incrementally; you wouldn't need to wait for some distant completion date to begin enjoying them. Begin building at the main transitway stations where there are already predictable crowds of people predictably exposed to the elements with no car. Build the network of covered sidewalks radially and progressively outward from these stations until the whole city is served by the new infrastructure. As a practical matter, each house or workplace would also have a covered passageway connecting it to the sidewalk.

1-13-2018

Such a system could also be viewed as a network of large air ducts that could be used to distribute centrally heated/cooled air to local homes and businesses, resulting in economies of scale. Therefore, individual homes and businesses would need much smaller furnaces and air conditioners, just sufficient to make up the difference between personal preferences and the publicly available temperatures. An all-purpose Peltier-effect device in each building might be sufficient.

1-14-2018

The system would have to be built through people's back yards, rather than their front yards, to avoid interference with garbage pickup and garage access. Where there are no back yards, such as downtown, it would have to be built above-grade, with access via the second stories of buildings. The system could be called CHAPP, for "central heating, air-conditioning, and pedestrian plan," and would be paid for mostly by subscriber fees, like any other utility.

1-19-2018
A windowless but sky lighted version of the duct/via system could also provide the privacy between adjacent lots now provided by the backyard hedge. Just build it where the hedges are now.

11-21-2020

When the Rideau street mall was built, it soon became a haven for homeless people and people with addictions looking for a warm place to sleep, and several businesses allegedly failed as a result. The city's response was to tear down the covered mall, at great expense. Will the same thing happen to the system proposed here? Where was the problem with Rideau street, exactly? You figure it out. This will be your homework assignment.

1-09-2018

Leadership will be required. Expect people to object to the city-borne part of the costs, such as expropriation of rights-of-way, preferring to just endure the hardships; right now, they know no better. Mayor Jim, I'm talking to you: Will you step up to the promotion and oversight of this great enterprise in its formative years and go down in history as one of the great mayors of Ottawa?

• Then the sidewalks will not have to be shoveled and salted in the winters.
• Then our old people will no longer break their bones slipping on ice that no amount of sanding and salting could have prevented.
• Then the city can finally begin to get people to leave their cars at home, relieving downtown congestion and the madness of rush hour.
• Then there will be fewer vehicles on the road, there will be less air pollution and less consumption of gasoline, resulting in healthier Ottawans and a reduced carbon footprint for the city.
• Then people will walk way more, again resulting in healthier Ottawans.
• Then Ottawa will be even more of a magnet for tourists in the winter.

A highly pedestrian population may even be a mellower population, if my theories of human dispersal are correct (See "The Pilgrim and the Whale" in my theory blog, "Theoretician's Progress," at https://mmmtheory.blogspot.com), leading to less crime and a higher quality of life.