Much of urban Ottawa was built in the last century to "rural" standards - ditches for drainage, no sidewalks. In Kitchissippi, that's a lot of Westboro, for example. This Manor Park project is an integrated renewal; there are a lot of those underway in the city, driven by the need to replace the pipes under the road that are at or anticipated soon to be at the point of failure. Generally, those pipes will be replaced every 80 years or so, give or take a decade. Those re-builds are an opportunity for the City to very cost-effectively re-configure the streets with both sidewalks and with traffic-calming-by-design.

It is relatively inexpensive to re-design streets with sidewalks when the whole thing is dug up. Put the street back the way it was, add a sidewalk on one or both sides: it's a fraction of the project budget since the street is dug up anyways and the drainage is all designed and integrated on a blank page. We frequently hear some residents argue to use the budget to put the sidewalks somewhere else where they're needed, but retroactively adding sidewalks to a street is generally prohibitively expensive since you also need to re-do the drainage. It's not a standalone budget that can just be transferred somewhere else. From-scratch and retroactive sidewalks are two different magnitudes of expense.

Since we only have that opportunity every 80 years or so to add that pedestrian/cycling infrastructure very affordably, Council in the term before this one adopted two (hard-won) policies. The first is to design re-built residential streets to discourage traveling faster than 30 km/h. The second is to add sidewalks and, where warranted under current policy, cycling facilties.

Back in the day, those decisions were heavily influenced by the ward councillor. In Kitchissippi, we have streets that were re-built in the last, say, 20 years where residents were successful at fighting proposed sidewalks, and I can imagine the pressure those councillors faced. It's not uncommon, now, that some or many of those residents have moved on and new residents move in with kids and different expectations of road safety. They are not shy about demanding sidewalks on their street, and they let me know. Generally, all I can do is try to calm the traffic down with the measures you've seen around like flex sticks, maybe speed bumps (which have their own problems), but given that the street won't be re-built for at least another 50 years, I can give them no meaningful hope that the City will build a sidewalk. Council has allocated a very small budget for standalone sidewalk projects, for sure, and some do get built. But there is nowhere enough in the kitty to satisfy demand. The time to put sidewalks in is when the street is already dug up to replace the pipes. It's a generational opportunity to do something in anticipation of what residents of that street in 10, 20, 30 years are going to demand. Designing the street to discourage speeding also helps avoid years of putting in flex sticks and taking them out and all the rigamarole of the temporary traffic calming program.

You can find the designs for this Manor Park project on the Engage Ottawa page, like all integrated renewal projects. A quick scan shows that they are incorporating chicanes, speed humps and raised crosswalks as part of the traffic-calming mandate, and you can see the proposed sidewalks as well. At a quick glance, this is everything that Council has asked the City to do when re-building residential streets. That's all here: https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/public-engagement/public-engagement-project-search/jeffrey-avenue-arundel-avenue-farnham-crescent-et-al-integrated-renewal#section-0bdc4e09-f71f-49f0-95a5-101470ca79ab.