Bike-friendly Ottawa can still do much more
It’s a bit embarrassing to admit that it’s taken a visit from a U.S.-based German professor, as well as a Dutch tour guide, to make me appreciate how bicycle-friendly Ottawa really is. But it’s the truth.
You might think that with cooler temperatures and people focusing on the election, concerns over cycling in our fair town would take a break until spring, but no.
First of all, this early autumn weather is great for cycling. Second of all, some of us believe federal electoral candidates should care a great deal about active transportation. Local voters say the environment is one of their top concerns, and given that transportation is one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions, finding ways to use the car less often and get around using transit, two wheels or feet would go a long way toward reducing our impact on the environment.
For regular people to ditch the car and travel by other means, we must have infrastructure in place for said other means to be convenient and safe. And not just objectively safe; active transportation has to feel safe or else we’ll keep driving.
It’s something the 100-plus active transportation enthusiasts who took over the bike racks outside Bayview Yards Monday evening understand. They were there for Bike Ottawa’s annual general meeting and they were curious to hear what National Capital Commission CEO Tobi Nussbaum had to say about his organization’s plan to improve biking in Ottawa. Winter maintenance was top of mind for many cyclists in attendance, including yours truly.
Nussbaum praised his predecessors for being ahead of their time, reminding the crowd that already in 1995 the NCC had 100 kilometres of MUPs (multiple-use pathways). Now we have more than 300 km.
Nothing is perfect, but it would be churlish to deny that when it comes to active transportation, things in Ottawa are improving. Just recently, it was decided to recognize that cars, really, have no business at Lansdowne Plaza (now confusingly rechristened Casino Lac Leamy Plaza even though there are no casinos or lakes or Leamy, whoever he was).
Allowing cars at Lansdowne was always a stupid idea in what ought to be prime urban space. Pedestrians don’t feel safe, and drivers who can’t get or park anywhere become frustrated. It’s a dangerously toxic mix, as anyone who’s ever been near a school drop-off zone in Suburbia Central five minutes before the morning bell can attest.
But back to bikes and feet. We need better winter maintenance on paths and sidewalks; we need to connect paths together to avoid cyclists sharing the road with cars, buses and trucks; and we need to build more paths generally, such as the new one connecting City Hall to the Via Rail station on Tremblay, along the LRT tracks. It cuts through all kinds of concrete spaghetti and gets you there in minutes.
I discovered it on a little private bike tour I enjoyed last week with Hans Moor, at the invitation of the German Embassy. I wasn’t the main guest; that was Ralph Buehler, a German active transportation expert, chair of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech, who was in town to give a talk to the NCC on transit integration.
The tour was to give our distinguished guest a sense of how bicycle-friendly Ottawa is. He was impressed, but not as much as I was, for Moor’s tour made me discover a few links I didn’t know we had, such as the one from the O’Connor bike lane to Lansdowne and another between Sandy Hill and Overbrook via the Adàwe Bridge.
Things are far from perfect, but improvements are being made. And as a great bonus, building active transportation links is orders of magnitude cheaper than widening roads. It’s better for us, too, and better for the planet. It would be smart for local electoral candidates to get out of the car more and see how much they could help the city and the NCC build sustainable active transportation links. I have this fantastic Dutch bike tour guide I can recommend. Brigitte Pellerin is an Ottawa writer who would like to see more people out of their cars.