Welcome to Ottawa, home of traffic hell – or traffic heck
For Gina Beaudoin, a staff member at Carleton University, living in Embrun means an arduous 52-kilometre commute.
Without traffic, a one-way trip takes about 40 minutes on the highway, but during rush hour it can take over 90 minutes.
“I waste so much gas and time sitting in traffic — those two hours a day I spend in the car could be spent with my kids,” said Beaudoin, a mother of five.
“The traffic situation in Ottawa could be improved.”
Ottawans are spending an average of 85 hours a year stuck in traffic, up from 81 hours last year, according to a GPS manufacturer that has declared Ottawa — somewhat controversially — the thirdmost-congested city in Canada.
The 2014 traffic index, released by TomTom NV, says the average commute in Ottawa — about 30 minutes without traffic — is delayed by more than 20 minutes every day, nearly doubling the time on the road.
For the amount of time spent on the 417 every year, you could work a full-time job for a week, take a couple of long naps, make a road trip to Atlanta, and still have time to kill.
Beaudoin belongs to a generation of workers caught in a city that’s promising relief with the underconstruction LRT but is stuck with extra delays during its construction.
There’s no mystery to the slowdowns. In the morning, traffic slows around Blair Road and crawls from the Split through Nicholas Street, where enough people leave the highway downtown to free up Queensway space.
Shelley McLean has covered traffic with 580 CFRA for 10 years and sees the past year of LRT construction as a whole new level of traffic trouble.
“We saw it last summer, and we’re going to see it again this summer,” during prime construction season, she said.
“It’s been a nightmare. For people coming in from the east end, I don’t know how they have been surviving.”
In Canada, the average commuter spent almost 90 per cent more time travelling during rush hour traffic in 2014 than any other time of day, almost doubling overall commute times, according to the TomTom Traffic Index report.
Ottawa ranked 10th for high traffic-congestion rates in North America — just behind San Jose, Calif., and Toronto.
But Barry Wellar, a traffic congestion measurement consultant in Ottawa, said traffic in this city is “chicken feed” compared with other urban areas in the world.
“Does anybody know an urban area anywhere in the world that’s not congested?” said Wellar.
“This, quite frankly, is a pile of nonsense. Congestion is a natural urban phenomenon. You don’t have a city without it.”
Vancouver ranked third overall in Canada with Toronto a close second. Montreal took fourth just behind Ottawa in the Canadian rankings.
Edmonton and Quebec City tied for fifth and Calgary had the honour of finishing last — though just being mentioned by the annual ranking is itself somewhat of a slight.