By Jesse Winter   Like wheeled Frankensteins, they roll across the city, flattening all in their path, unstoppable by even the coldest Ottawa winter. Fat bikes. They’ve been spotted cruising across frozen snow banks or weaving between traffic. Their bulbous wheels, swollen like a Yeti’s feet, spinning through snow and ice with ease. The fat bike craze has grown steadily across Canada for the past couple of years, but they’ve been slowly gaining traction in Canada’s snowiest regions for over a decade. As Dave Macki, co-owner of Phat Moose Cycles explains, fat bikes were once relegated to the fringes along with other bizarre creations like tall bikes, recumbents and other freak bikes. “Brands like Surly has been making their Pugsley for years. Salsa made one for a long time as well, but now everyone under the sun makes a fat bike,” he said.     Macki’s been in the fat bike business since 2003, when the high tech company he was working for got bought out. He founded Phat Moose Cycles, a small specialized bike boutique in Old Ottawa East with a friend and soon developed a loyal clientele. Within that customer base, Macki said, was always one or two strange folk who wanted something weird, something outside the norm. “We always had about one guy who wanted some sort of freak bike, so we’d build a fat bike for him,” Macki said. Starting in about 2010, more people began to pick up on the trend. Sales of fat bikes climbed at Phat Moose, as people realized that having five-inch-wide tires (that’s 13 centimetres in road cycling speak) was perfect for battling winter riding conditions here. No longer would riders be forced to stable their steeds when snow started falling. Macki’s shop has doubled the number of fat bikes it sells every year for the past three, to a high of about two-dozen last season. He’s hopeful that November’s brief snowfalls will help propel that number even higher this year. The bikes have earned a cult following in many places, especially in Canada’s north. In Yellowknife it’s increasingly common to see fat bikes along the ice roads on Great Slave Lake, with hardy souls churning their pedals against the biting wind. In Whitehorse, there are now dozens of fat bikes, and counting. In such extreme conditions, having wide, fat tires isn’t enough. Below -25 C, even high-end brakes can fail when the hydraulic fluid starts to freeze, so bike manufacturers have cast their eyes backwards for old-school tech to solve the problem. Remember grip shifters, those sad excuses for bike shifting technology that thankfully went the way of the dodo in the early 2000s? Turns out they work much better in Canadian winters than the precision indexed and spring-loaded shifters that most mountain bikes now use. And cable-powered disc brakes, which often invite scorn from bike snobs, have a hidden benefit: unlike their expensive hydraulic cousins, they can’t freeze. Macki said most people in Ontario use fat bikes as stand-ins for mountain bikes in the snow – riding them on packed-down snowmobile trails like the Osgoode multi-use pathway. Even some groomed ski areas like Mont St. Marie allow them. But they are equally at home plowing through the snowdrifts on Ottawa streets. If another polar vortex descends on Ottawa this winter, it’s likely that fat bikes will emerge victorious once again.  ...

By Priscilla Hwang   It’s noisy. It’s dusty. It’s messy. That’s how Brian Wilson, manager of Nestlé Toll House Café on Rideau Street, describes the unpleasant construction that has been disrupting his new business. Rideau Street is a major transit line for pedestrians, buses, and cars in Ottawa. Rideau Centre, on the busy thoroughfare, is an important hub for people travelling to and from their destinations. Both the mall and street have been undergoing major reconstruction this past year. “It’s a little inconvenient when you’re trying to get into and out of the Rideau Centre,” said Jessica Muus, a student at University of Ottawa who travels through the mall on her way to and from class. “The doors are often blocked off and the bus stops crowded.” The street construction began in March and the mall has been going through a series of projects since October 2013. John Pilon is a construction worker who’s been working in Rideau Centre for the past six months. “We do a lot of night work. If it’s noisy we have to do it after hours,” he said. “We start from 9:30 at night to 6 o’clock in the morning,” Pilon said. But walking in and around the mall mid-morning, the noise is still obtrusive.     “It’s very loud,” said Jason Sousa. He’s been using transportation through Rideau Street for three years now. “I’ve got to admit it’s not very pleasant being around this area, but once I get on the bus, I don’t think about it anymore. You just have to go through it you know?” Sousa also called the construction “visual pollution.” Wilson agrees. “It’s a visual distraction for a lot our customers,” he said. “Looking outside, we have dumpsters right beside us. They’re dumping loads and loads of garbage down every hour.” Nestlé Toll House Café had its grand opening in November. “It’s kind of a catch-22 because we’re excited to have a new location and it’s a flagship location,” said Wilson. But he said it hurts that the construction “is right beside us.” Employees mop up the floors of the café every hour from the dust brought in by customers, said Wilson. “People are tracking in dust from the construction site, and not from walking on it but just from the sidewalks.” “It’s a very attractive, clean place,” said John Petrolias, who decided to try Nestlé Toll House Café Tuesday. “But there’s a problem. Not only does the construction look ugly, but it makes it hard to walk around especially when it snows or rains.” For business owners like Wilson, the construction is more than just a noisy nuisance. He deals with customer complaints and his business suffers. “It’s also a traffic concern. What I’m finding is that we have buses turning, a lot of trucks unloading right outside our store here,” he said. “It’s chasing a lot of customers away.”   Officially, construction on Rideau Street will end on Dec. 5, according to a spokesperson from Coun. Mathieu Fleury’s office. Substantial construction underground has been completed and landscaping and street furniture (like benches, streetlamps, and bus stops) will be installed mid-December, Fleury’s spokesperson said. But that still leaves overhead hydro wires to be removed in January, hydro poles that will be removed in the spring, and finally sidewalk replacements after that, according to Fleury’s office. “We get a lot of tourists in here as well and I’m almost surprised that they ventured this far up Rideau Street because if I was in their shoes, I might get to the mall but I certainly wouldn’t walk past it when I see the walls and walls of covered sidewalk,” said Wilson. Construction on the Rideau Centre will continue until 2016. “Construction is a dusty business,” said Wilson. “It’ll be nice when it’s done.”     [View the story “Rideau Construction Rants and Reactions” on Storify]    ...

By Karen Henderson   Megan Leah had no idea that roughly 140 transport trucks travelling through her neighbourhood every day contain dangerous goods. “We don’t tend to think about what’s in the trucks, we just think of the trucks,” said Leah. “We don’t think about the dangers on the street.” Leah works at the Champagne Fitness Centre on King Edward Avenue and deals with complaints from frustrated customers trying to access their parking lot, cross the road, or cycle down the street. Every day, an average of 2,600 transport trucks travel across Highway 417, through Lowertown on King Edward Avenue and across the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge to Gatineau. One hundred and forty of those trucks carry dangerous goods, according to the 2007 Interprovincial Roadside Truck Survey. Dangerous goods, as defined by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, are substances that “could cause harm to people, property or the environment” such as petroleum, crude oil, or chemicals. Kate Carradine, manager of the Andrew Fleck Child Care Services located at the intersection of George Street and King Edward Avenue, is concerned about how a potential spill could harm the children she cares for daily. “If these goods are toxic then this is obviously a huge concern due to the fact that we have over 85 children in attendance at the centre and this could pose a serious safety risk should there ever be an accident of any kind,” said Carradine in an email. A 2013 study by the Fraser Institute found risk of an oil spill is higher during road transport than it is when rail, marine or pipelines move oil products. On Tuesday the federal standing committee on transport, infrastructure and communities met for the fourth and final time to review dangerous goods transport regulations. The committee examined transportation safety guidelines and regulation of dangerous goods transport for rail, air, sea and road across the country. This review was spurred by federal Minister of Transport Lisa Raitt in 2013, shortly after the Lac Mégantic rail disaster. Mathieu Fleury, city councillor of Rideau-Vanier Ward, said that a truck tunnel built downtown could relieve 93 per cent of truck traffic and possibly 100 per cent if the tunnel “is engineered properly” to accommodate transport trucks carrying dangerous goods. The City of Ottawa has hired Parsons Engineering to complete a feasibility study on the proposed truck tunnel. The study will be completed in 2015. Previously, the City had partnered with the province to assess building a bridge to reroute the truck traffic, but the province pulled support from the plan in 2013. Some Lowertown residents have reservations about the efficacy of the truck tunnel and the probability of it being built in the near future. Nathan Davis, co-chair of the King Edward Avenue Task Force and an ocean engineer employed with the Department of National Defence, said “I’m skeptical about the ability of the tunnel to solve the trucking problem.” Davis called the current truck situation on King Edward Avenue “an urban planning absolute fail.” Davis said many trucks have overturned in recent years at the northern end of King Edward Avenue and that speed was a factor in these crashes. Davis said a dangerous goods spill near the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge would be “an absolute disaster” due to the high residential population in that area and the nearby waterway. An accident in this region of the city would be of particular concern because of the high population density. The population density of Lowertown is four-times the Ottawa average, according to the 2011 Ottawa Neighbourhood Study. Transport Canada statistics show that Ontario has the highest number of emergency dangerous goods spills in Canada, with 308 reported emergencies in 2013. Road-related spills constituted 204 of the reports. Fleury confirmed the feasibility study for the truck tunnel would not be completed until 2015 and estimates that the tunnel will be approved no earlier than 2017. The approval of...