Johnson: How cycling lanes across Highway 417 will transform Ottawa

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.

Map of Highway 417 interchanges — Four interchanges will get bike lanes in future.

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.

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Motion to improve road safety

Today, the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee unanimously approved my motion to improve road safety across Ottawa. Here's my motion:

WHEREAS speeding continues to be one of the most significant road‑safety concerns raised by residents across the City of Ottawa, particularly in residential neighbourhoods and school zones where vulnerable road users, including children, are at heightened risk; and

WHEREAS recent City data has shown a substantial increase in speeding in school zones, with compliance dropping from 87 percent to 41 percent within a 12‑week period following the removal of Automated Speed Enforcement (ASE) cameras, and high‑end speeding increasing from 0.3 percent to over 4 percent during the same period; and

Whereas speed data is an important input in understanding risk related to more serious collisions; and

WHEREAS the city’s current approach to collecting speed data is limited and does not provide a full picture of speeds across the roadway network, and

WHEREAS other jurisdictions across Canada and internationally are increasingly incorporating innovative, technology‑enabled, and data‑driven approaches—including, predictive analytics, and AI‑supported monitoring systems—to inform their road safety programs; and

WHEREAS the City of Ottawa is currently undertaking work to update the Road Safety Action Plan, which will guide the road safety priorities for the next term of Council; and

WHEREAS this work presents an opportunity to modernize and strengthen the inputs used to make informed data-driven decisions about road safety;

THERFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT staff, through the update to the City’s Road Safety Action Plan, leverage advanced data analytics, predictive modelling, and AI‑supported technologies, where appropriate, to enhance the City’s ability to identify, monitor, and respond to speeding trends and inform road safety priorities

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT staff consider speed management as a focus area when developing the Road Safety Action Plan that will be presented to Council in 2027.

Progress Report: Year Three

Read the Year Three Progress Report

Dear Neighbours,

I am pleased to provide you with the College Ward Annual
Progress Report, showing the work that we did in 2025. I work hard every day to represent you on the
issues that are important to our neighbourhoods.

I hope this Progress Report is informative of the projects we
took on last year, and that it demonstrates my continuing
transparency and accountability to you. There is still more
always to do, and I list some future areas of interest.

Warm regards,
Laine

Out of Service: Ottawa’s Transit Problem

The news this week wasn’t good. Thousands of bus trips cancelled again in February. LRT down to one train for the foreseeable future. When it comes to Ottawa’s public transit, it seems there’s never good news.

Even the announcement of progress on the LRT East project was met with cynicism, given that the trains that Line 1 uses continue to have “spalling” issues with the wheel assembly.

When will it end? And what am I – one of the members of OC Transpo’s governance body – going to do about it?

Since 2022, I’ve been wrestling with myself over a feeling of powerlessness about OC Transpo, in conflict with my ability as a decision maker to affect change.

I have residents who are suffering immeasurably from a lack of service. Algonquin College students have the biggest uptake of the U-pass of all of Ottawa’s post-secondary institutions, but they can’t get to and from classes reliably. Bells Corners’ routes were cut during the pandemic, and the subsequent elimination of the 200 series through the New Ways to Bus changes have completely isolated that community from transit.