Ottawa Citizen Op-ed: How cycling lanes across Highway 417 will change Ottawa | Ottawa Citizen
Almost daily, as the city councillor for College Ward, I see families squeezing down the narrow edge of a Highway 417 overpass to reach the other side — to get to school, to daycare, to shopping. It’s scary. And what happens when people are too scared to walk or cycle? They drive.
And daily, I receive emails from residents who are frustrated with congestion, speeding and buses not getting them where they need to go on time.
We now are being given the chance to start addressing it all.
With a new agreement between the Province of Ontario and the City of Ottawa, we will see four spans across Highway 417 replaced with enough width for an actual sidewalk, and actual cycle tracks with protection from the vehicles. They are: the Richmond Road interchange; Pinecrest interchange; Woodroffe interchange; and Maitland interchange.
Since these spans are replaced only every 75 years, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for two levels of government to work together and invest in a vision that creates real choice for people about how they want to get around. And we did. The city is contributing $5.4 million from its active transportation budget to pay for one, and the province is absorbing the cost of the other three in question.
Why is this so significant? The provincial Ministry of Transportation is responsible for enacting provisions of the Highway Traffic Act. It’s in the primary business of moving people by car down the highway, over the spans, and up and down the access ramps, as efficiently as possible.
However, when that highway bisects a city as the 417 does Ottawa? For those in cars, it’s a east-west access. For everyone else, it’s a wall.
As Ottawa has grown, College Ward, once the heart of the City of Nepean, is no longer on the edge of the city. We now have large suburbs all around whose residents want access to what our city has to offer both north and south: the river, the LRT, the Greenbelt, shopping, schools, good employers. This growing population is straining our transportation network, and we are taking longer to get to where we want to go.
We sit in traffic. Buses sit in traffic. Cut-through traffic comes in to residential neighbourhoods at high speeds. The city pays for temporary traffic-calming but we can barely keep up. So people don’t feel safe to walk or bike anywhere, which means you’re going to choose to drive and sit in traffic. You’re not going to opt for a bus because it can’t get you anywhere on time (the most recent statistics from OC Transpo cited that 32 per cent of trips not delivered on time were because of on-street service adjustments, including traffic congestion). You’re locked into a bad choice. Does that feel like freedom to you?
It doesn’t feel like freedom for me, when I have to load two kids in snowsuits into a car in winter just to go get a bag of milk. It doesn’t feel like freedom for the parent who is late for work because they feel compelled to drive their kid to school, four blocks away. It doesn’t feel like freedom for those kids who don’t want to get dropped off by said parents because it’s too embarrassing. It doesn’t feel like freedom for the paramedic who is trying to reach an incident but no one can move over.
We need safe pedestrian and cycling infrastructure so that the people who can, will choose to walk or cycle to get something done. They can make that choice and decrease the number of cars on the road. The fewer cars on the road, the less congestion there is for those who can’t choose anything but a vehicle, and we get our buses moving around better. We get some actual freedom of movement within our communities, which increases local spending, enhances neighbourhood relationships and community safety, and gives us better air to breathe.
I was glad to work with MTO and city staff for a vision that promotes freedom of choice in our growing city.
Laine Johnson is the city councillor for College Ward.
