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Phil JenkinsOttawa’s More Successful TwinOttawa Citizen June 29, 2009

There are many similarities between our town and Curitiba, Brazil.And we can learn a lot from this efficient and green city There is no endeavour more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream.When a city accepts as its mandate its quality of life; when it respects the people wholive in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for future generations,the people share responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the onlyway to achieve that collective dream. Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, BrazilOttawa certainly has a lot of things on its to-do list just now. Dig a tunnel underdowntown; ruin Lansdowne Park; build a Native Heritage Centre by 2013; put anotherbridge across the river; ruin Le Breton Flats; build a new central library; for mercy'ssake put in more bike lanes; ruin the rural/urban interface; go greener; replace thebroken convention centre.Did I miss anything?I recall when I was at Vincent Massey elementary school there was a boy, and hisname was Kenny. Kenny was a model child, and we were told we could do a lot worsethan be more like Kenny. (No doubt Kenny was in turn modelled on his parents, andthey on theirs, and so on. Kenny had gene power.)I tried hard to Kennify myself, and probably failed.Later, when I wanted to become a writer, I read the better, successful ones, in thebelief that they were clearly ahead of me in the game and had something to teachme. That worked a little better.Well, getting back to Ottawa's to-do list, there is a city in Brazil, in the southernmoststate of Paraná, by the name of Curitiba.If you are an urban planner, you will have heard of Curitiba, and you may even havebeen there to visit it. A lot of urban planners make the trip, because the Brazilian cityis a model one, particularly with regards to its rapid transit system, its downtownhistoric preservation, its greenspace, its recycling programs and its civicmanagement.Curitiba's solutions to the problems that all cities face -- how to get people to wherethey work, how to break the addiction to cars, how to give people spaces where theycan think subjectively about life and get away from the clock, what to do with thegarbage -- are all innovative, and most importantly they work. The root of thesolution, actually, is that for 40 years their mayors have all been town planners.Imagine that.

As they have progressed (or not) from village to town to city, Ottawa and Curitibahave shared some similarities in their chronology.Both became capitals in the mid-1800s, we of our country and they of their state.As far as their transport histories go, they experienced the same escalation; trains,bicycles and cars. (Potted history for Ottawa: The Bytown and Prescott railway sentthe first steam engine into Ottawa, precariously, in 1854. In 1882, 10 men on bicyclescalled Premiers, which had 60-inch front wheels with no gears, chains or brakes, tooka short ride down Bank Street. The first car with a combustion engine under the hoodputt-putted around Ottawa in 1901.) Then, in the 1940s or thereabouts, both cities, experiencing growth pains particularlyto do with traffic, called in a French planner to sort things out. Ours was called Jacques Gréber, theirs Alfred Agache. Where things diverge is in the 1960s.In 1964, when Charlotte Whitton was in her last year as mayor in the big office inOttawa, mayor Ivo Arzua of Curitiba asked for proposals as to how to manage thecity's growth, most especially in regard to what to do with all those once and futurecars. Both Ottawa and Curitiba then boasted a population of around half a million andrapidly counting. The best answer Arzua got came from a pack of young planners at the localuniversity, headed by a man with an appropriate surname called Jaime Lerner. Lerneret al's proposal was adopted as the Curitiba master plan in 1968.As job one, Lerner set up an urban planning department, which they didn't have, andhis team pinned a wish list to the planning board which included: keeping urbansprawl to a minimum, getting cars out of downtown, fending off the developersitching to condo-ize and strip mall Curitiba's historic district, and most of all give theCuritibans an offer of accessible and affordable public transit that they could notrefuse. They also proposed fashioning main linear transit arteries from the existing road grid,thus making direct, high-speed routes in and out of the city. The team then did something that, when we reflect on Ottawa's municipal talent forprocrastination and deferral and gentility in dealing with developers, makes one tipone's hard hat to them. They not only talked the talk, they drove the drive.As a symbolic first gesture, and there were more to follow, they created Brazil's firstpedestrian-only street in 1970. (Ottawa had opened Canada's first no-car street fouryears earlier). The next move was to create a road design, the Sistema Trinário,which sandwiched a two-lane street restricted to buses and local car traffic betweenwide, fast-flowing one-way throughways.So, while Ottawa was using a piecemeal approach, a Queensway here, a train stationway out there, Curitiba got busy lassoing the mustang cars and taming them. In itsplace they put a donkey, in fact a herd of donkeys, in a rapid transit system centredon the bus, and it is that system, probably the most efficient in the world, that we'lllook at next week.Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer.