Report urges $48M for south Kanata roads

Widening two routes to four lanes would speed up commute to downtown areas

Commuters headed toward downtown from south Kanata need wider roads to keep congestion from slowing them down and the city should spend $48 million on the work, a new report to city council’s transportation committee says.

Much of the work to widen Old Richmond Road and West Hunt Club Road, which connect south Kanata to Highway 416, would be done in 2016, the report says. Later, the city would widen Hope Side Road, which continues the route across Kanata’s southern tip. The roads would go from two lanes to four and get medians, paved shoulders and, on the stretches closest to Kanata, bike lanes.

It’ll mean buying about 1.7 hectares of land (mostly in a long strip next to the existing streets) and paving some of the Greenbelt, which will require permission from the National Capital Commission the city doesn’t yet have but expects to get.

The city looked at various alternatives other than an ordinary widening of the roads but they all came up short, the report says. It even considered adding just one “reversible” lane, so traffic could have two out of three lanes eastbound in the mornings and two out of three westbound in the afternoons, but the experts advised against it because Ottawa doesn’t have many.

“Unusual configuration may cause driver confusion. Local experience is limited to the Champlain Bridge,” the report says. Plus, the lit signs are expensive and would block views of the Greenbelt, and wide roads with medians are less likely to be blocked by collisions.

All three councillors whose wards are implicated — Allan Hubley, Rick Chiarelli and Scott Moffatt — back the plan, the report says.