I’m busy in Ottawa for the next couple of days, hence the light posting. It’s my first time in Ottawa since I was less than 5. I haven’t done much exploring yet, but in walking a couple of kilometres to attend an event last night I noticed two small, interesting details.
Their blocks aren’t numbered the same way. In Vancouver, and in many other North American cities I’ve visited, each block gets a new ‘hundredth’ number. The first block has addresses from 000 to 099, the second from 100 to 199, and so forth. The advantage to this is obviously that if you know what block you’re in, and you know where you want to go, you can calculate the number of blocks it’ll take to get there.
In Ottawa, there’s no such luck. Addresses are simply numbered concurrently until you run out of street. This is true of the Europrean cities I’ve visited (well, certain kooky Dublin streets are numbered up one side and down the other), so I’m assuming this difference reflects Ottawa’s elder status.
The second curiosity is that there are thin, four-foot high green poles sticking out of the pavement in front of light standards and other important sidewalk detritus. This, I assume, is to help the snow plow operators know when they’re about to run into something solid. You’d think they could spot the light standards, but they’re much thicker near the bottom (the standards–I haven’t seen any snow plow drivers as there’s no snow).
This got me thinking about creating a photo essay documenting the ways Canadian cities deal with extreme weather. My first example was the charming grates you see in downtown Calgary. Coincidentally, Heather Armstrong posted a photo of one today.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Trust me, when there’s 6 feet of snow, you need the friggin poles. And then is not the time to plant them.
As for street numbering, I guess eastern Canada cities are silly. I didn’t know what a block was until I went out with my vancouverite wife. The concept simply doesn’t exist here. If you say to someone here: go down two blocks, he’ll look at you funny.
That would be a great photo essay. In the prairies, we have plug ins and block heaters.
In Montreal, they construct these bizarre little cellophane huts over their driveways.
And Vancouver is the first place where I’ve seen strollers with waterproof sheets for the rain.
Yep, I’ve lived in too many parts of Canada.
(And I didn’t get the Whitehorse job, unfortunately. Still looking…)
Alexis: we have indeed those “huts”. It’s not cellophane. It’s fiberglass fabric or something. It’s expensive too. Otherwise I would have one, because it’s a pain in the butt to remove the snow from over your car. Especially when it froze during the night.
I think it might be that the wetern cities are the “goofy” ones.
It seems all the cities in eastern North America and all the cities in Europe as well as most cities elsewher e in the world use the same more organic numbering system. Mostly the cities in western N.A. and I assume places like Australia use the rigid 100 grid pattern.
I have lived in Vancouver and Edmonton and it certainly is easier to find things on a map. (Once you find NW, NE etc. Or figure out that streets run east-west in Vancouver but North-south in New West.)
But cities elsewhere have another system to help find things. They mostly just tell you that the place you are looking for is two blocks north or south of a well known landmark.
Even with these little poles its amazing to find out how much damage has been done at the end of the winter. street signs knocked down, fences destroyed, and yes the occasional damaged fire hydrant. Bet those are fun to fix at -20C!
I discussed this very thing with friends when I lived in Vancouver. The things that are done in winter cities that warmer places, like vancouver, don’t have to contend with.
Frost heaves in spring, crumbling pavement, parking problems when it snows etc.
I found the alleys in Vancouver quite amazing. I can’t imagine a snowplow in an alley, running into garbage cans, garages and cars.
Hey, count your blessings. Buildings are numbered chronologically in Tokyo. Yes, that’s right, chronologically. So the first and second buildings are 1 and 2, even if they’re miles apart. Addresses are completely useless there.
No one in Ulaan Baatar had addresses. In fact, there were very few street names. It made cab rides interesting.
I found Melbourne infuriating, because street numbers restart in every new neighbourhood, so the numbers rarely get up into the high hundreds. In Vancouver, it would be like having numbers start at 1 at Stanley Park, then restart once you get out of the West End into downtown, then restart again at the edge of Yaletown, then again on the other side of the bridge, and so on.
And sometimes the street names in Melbourne change too, so finding 49 Victoria street could be completely different from one part of the city to the next. And I noticed that when I was there, in 1995, even all the locals carried a massive city mapbook in their cars.
A Chicagoan in Montreal did a photo essay about snow removal in Montreal last January.
Here’s a pic I took a while ago showing the little flagpoles they attach to fire hydrants in Montreal, in order to find them underneath the snow:
http://randomdude.com/photos/first_snow_2005/Pages/Buried_hydrant.php