This city just can’t seem to get moving
West Carleton-March Coun. Eli El-Chantiry is talking hands-free from his car, where he swears he spends half his life.
“This last week, honest to God, there are just more and more cars on the road,” he said one day last week, an unexpected observation since I called about an entirely different topic.
But he felt the need to unburden. “It doesn’t matter what time I leave (Carp) in the morning, six o’clock even, and it still takes an hour or more to get into the city.”
The day before, a reporter walked by my desk with another traffic lament. She left her Kanata home at 8 a.m. for a 9 a.m. court case. She got to Elgin Street at 9:40 and missed everything.
Kanata to Ottawa in 100 minutes? How did things get this bad?
We see this every morning outside our offices on Baxter Road, which overlook the Queensway: gridlock, gridlock, gridlock, nothing but brake lights and inching rubber. Dear daily driver, how have you not lost your mind?
So why does this matter more today? Because the city’s two main means of moving people, our transit system, our principal freeway, are not working properly — at the same time — and it is hardly an exaggeration to say thousands are suffering the consequences, coming and going.
No one really knows how many commuters have ditched their Presto card for private wheels, but you begin to hear stories. El-Chantiry said one of his office staff, a transit user for 12 years, was so frustrated with delays she began driving to work.
In other words, it’s the unpredictably that slays. Travel planning is now a minefield of guesswork. On Saturday, near 5 p.m., it was bumper-to-bumper eastbound near Maitland as we drove back from the cottage on a wet, lousy day. Huh?
The construction between Maitland and Island Park, a three-kilometre stretch, is obviously a pinch point.
The $95-million project is widening the freeway from three lanes to four and, because the roadway has to keep operating, it takes a good chunk of time to finish.
Announced in December 2016, it won’t be completed until the fall of 2020.
Still left to do, according to the Ministry of Transportation: finishing work on the Merivale Road bridge rehabilitation; rebuilding the concrete median wall with electrical and storm sewer work; final paving.
There is the nagging prediction that adding two more lanes will do nothing to ease congestion, but at the minimum, motorists can stop zigging and zagging through temporary lane-changes afraid of cleaving their neighbour’s door off. It will, of course, just fill with more cars.
The ministry publishes average daily traffic counts at all 417 intersections. Though the numbers are from 2016, they’re quite revealing. Bayshore to St. Laurent is the fat part of the system with the greatest volumes. No surprise there, really.
Parkdale had the highest count at 184,100 vehicles, vastly higher than Eagleson at 118,900. Metcalfe was second at 178,000.
Finding a non-Queensway alternative isn’t always easy. Parts of west-east Richmond Road (near Cleary) are down to one lane at the moment and the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway is quite properly chewed up.
You will have noticed, in other words, that LRT Phase 2 is off the drawing board and coming at us with bulldozers left, right and centre.
OPP Insp. Paul Bedard, who is in charge of marine and traffic units in the eastern region, agrees the construction has slowed traffic passing through the Carling area. Not only have there been occasional speed reductions, but there are frequent visual distractions that cause motorists to be more cautious.
“A construction crew automatically slows people down,” said Bedard, who has been stuck in many a Queensway traffic jam since 2007.
“One car slows down, it slows down 1,000 cars behind it.”
It only makes sense that volumes are on the increase because Ottawa’s suburban flanks have grown so much.
“Let’s face it, Ottawa just hit the million mark.” (Indeed. In 1998, the average daily traffic count on the 417 at Metcalfe was 92,300; in 2016, it was 178,600.)
Something else, too. An already clogged system, with busy, unattractive alternatives, suffers a fragility. Throw in a couple of collisions, some rain, poor road conditions, Christmas shopping and we have the makings of a traffic nightmare.
Collisions? Believe it. So far in 2019, there have been 1,097 in the 417 area patrolled by Ottawa OPP — so maybe three a day.
The new trains barely work and the old cars barely move. Quite a jam we’ve got ourselves in.
Let’s face it, Ottawa just hit the million mark.