Getting to the Coffee Shop: A Case Study in Suburban Villages

Let’s look for a few minutes at how the average resident in Convent Glen North might go to get a coffee. We don’t really have coffee shops anywhere nearby, despite the vast majority of adults in the area having at least one per day. The nearest coffee shop is called Creative Stir Cafe, and it’s located at 1439 Youville Dr.

We are going to look at three things today from the perspective of a driver, cyclist, and pedestrian. First, how long does it take to get from the cafe to any housing, how long does it take to travel the equivalent distance of a 10-minute walk, and then how long it takes to get to get to the nearest coffee shop from Convent Glen North by car, by bike, or on foot.

Thanks to RadiusMapper for the great visuals, links to each map will be in the corresponding image caption.

This article started life as a section of a larger conversation on prioritizing local shops and small businesses over parking in our cities, you can read the whole article here: Local Neighbourhoods Need More Shops and Less Parking.

From the Cafe to the Nearest Housing (Places Where People Live)

Note: this just gets you to the very first housing you encounter in any direction, most visitors end up travelling much further.

On Foot (10 minutes)

By Bike (3 minutes)

By Car (2 minutes)

This illustrates a couple of things for me. First, it takes one extra minute to cycle to the cafe compared to driving, and anybody who might want to take a walk from their home to get a coffee has a 10-minute *minimum* travel time. There are other places that will serve coffee on St Joseph of course, but from the perspective of the business owner setting up a cafe here, the only ‘built-in’ customer base is people who work in the industrial and commercial park. Also, Youville is an extremely unpleasant street to walk or bike on, thanks to it being an industrial park full of mostly car dealerships. So, though you can do it, especially if you live nearby, this is something you’ll have to consider.

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How Far Does the Equivalent of a 10-minute Walk Get You?

Next, we’ll pick a central spot in Convent Glen North and just start travelling until we get as far as a 10-minute walk gets you, and see how long that takes. In an ideal neighbourhood (a suburban Village), most daily or weekly errands should be accessible well within this radius.

On Foot (10 minutes)

By Bike (3 minutes)

By Car (3 minutes)

The interesting thing I notice here is that driving and cycling get you basically the same distance in 3 minutes. In some ways, the paths and parks here actually advantage cycling slightly, but only in this one small way. Basically, if we want to make a suburban Village, we need to (over time) fill our community with cafes, grocery stores, corner stores, gyms, book or bike or craft shops, hardware stores, a library. Being able to conveniently walk to all of these places would greatly reduce the average family’s reliance on cars, and could save the average household something like $10,000 a year or more if they were able to get around with only 1 vehicle instead of 2 or 3.

As residents, we should be demanding that zoning restrictions on these kinds of businesses be relaxed, so that we can start to see businesses like those listed in the previous paragraph becoming no-brainers to build and open all over these communities. Most people want to live near a coffee shop, a restaurant, a community space, or a corner store. Putting more of these near where people live will make their lives easier.

If you want to meet people in the city who see local communities working better this way, join the Eastern Ottawa Urbanism Club. We’ll have regular meetings starting soon, get on the mailing list now.

The Eastern Ottawa Urbanism Club meets regularly. Learn more:

Now Let’s Get to the Nearest Coffee Shop

Finally, we are going to set off for the nearest coffee shop (still Creative Stir Cafe) from a typical home in Voyageur loop. Let’s see how long it takes.

On Foot (25 minutes)

By Bike (9 minutes)

By Car (6 minutes)

This comparison is really just intended to show that when you prioritize the movement of car traffic over almost everything else, you get a result that benefits cars. Not only can you get there faster (only slightly faster than a bike, I will say), but get on the highway or an arterial road and you can get very far in almost no time.

Am I capable of saying something nice about cars? Yes, when given absolute free reign over a transportation network (like we have now in Ottawa), a car will max out travel efficiency per minute. However, this doesn’t scale almost at all, and the result when you make driving easy for everyone at the expense of other more efficient mass modes of transportation, the result is predictable traffic congestion. This is especially true along the fastest routes like highways and the roads that feed onto them, mostly during rush hour.

We can design our suburban villages to be slightly longer and more complicated to leave by car, and make them WAY easier to leave on foot, by bike, or by bus or train. While we’re doing that, we can also make it WAY easier to do what we need to do without needing to leave our village, by allowing small business owners in the community to build small businesses *in the community*.

I’m working on a series right now looking at all kinds of community amenities, through the lens of how they’re not evenly distributed throughout our neighbourhoods. To read that when it’s done, consider subscribing below to get new articles straight to your inbox.