Building a Sustainable City

This Swedish city is filled with green and renewable sources. The vacuum chute, meant to replace garbage bins, is one of the examples of sustainability. Food waste was being turned into biogas for buses in this city in Sweden. The last example would be the charging stations for the electric cars.  

In my opinion, Ottawa as a city should work on becoming more sustainable through improving mass transit, making office/retail buildings more efficient, and last but not least, we should work on having more cycle friendly environments (bike lanes) to increase cycling as a mode of transportation.

Improving mass transit and making office buildings more efficient could be difficult due to the mass numbers. I do believe that from OC transpo adding more bike racks on the front of their buses can boost both mass transit and cycling at the same time. Ottawa is already doing a lot by themselves such as the implementation of the OLRT and adding bike racks to OC transpo buses. I believe that if Ottawa were to add more bike racks and benches all over the city while adding more bike lanes, then it’ll really benefit the city. Ottawa also has something called the Sunday Bike Day which I have personally partaken in. It is a day where Ottawa closes down a few streets to go car free, which creates more than 50 kilometres of scenic course open exclusively to cyclists, runners, walkers etc.

Overall, I do believe that Ottawa has a bright future with all of its developments.