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Bike Ottawa: Councillor Candidate Questions
Your name *
Peter Jan Karwacki
Ward where you are a candidate *
RideauRockcliffe
How do you typically get around your ward and Ottawa, and how does that shape your policy outlook?
Do you personally cycle in Ottawa, even occasionally, and what does that experience tell you about what needs to change?
I get around mostly by ebike —
I've owned four since 2012 — supplemented by driving when the trip or weather doesn't make cycling practical.
That's not a talking point, it's how I actually experience the ward's infrastructure, and it shapes how I evaluate it.
When you ride the same intersections a city planning document describes, the gap between "Complete Street" language and what's actually on the ground becomes obvious fast.
I've documented it directly — a well-designed intersection versus Coventry and St. Laurent, which is a mess by comparison. That's not opinion, that's what's there.
It's also why I don't take City proposals at face value.
On the St. Laurent Transit Priority Corridor EA, the City's plan still preserves six to eight lanes of vehicle capacity in key sections and leans on shared bus-bike lanes instead of continuous, physically separated cycle tracks (aaa)— the standard that actually makes a route usable for a senior, a kid, or someone with mobility limitations, not just a confident commuter. I check that against groups like Bike Ottawa's own analysis, and the pattern holds: the rhetoric says "complete street," the design still prioritizes vehicle throughput.
That's the throughline in my platform: I'm a data analyst by training, and I don't guess — I check the record, whether that record is a council vote or a lane width on a corridor I ride myself. Infrastructure that works for everyone, including low-power EVs and cyclists who aren't 25 and fearless, isn't a lifestyle preference. It's what the data — and the pavement — actually show is missing.
If elected, what would be your top three transportation priorities?
ST. LAURENT tunnel, Vanier Parkway and Beechwood traffic circle, new easr end crossing
Ottawa's Official Plan sets a goal of having the majority of trips within the City made by low-carbon modes, including cycling. Do you support that target, and what concrete steps would you take to achieve it on your watch?
I support the target.
I don't support treating it as a target — I support treating it as a deliverable.
Ottawa isn't on track, and no amount of "Complete Street" language in a staff report changes that unless the design specs change with it.
I don't run on impressions, I run on the record — and the record on St. Laurent Boulevard, one of this ward's key corridors, shows a Transit Priority Corridor EA that still preserves six to eight lanes of vehicle capacity in key sections and falls back on shared bus-bike lanes instead of continuous, physically separated AAA cycle tracks.
You cannot hit a majority-low-carbon-trips target with infrastructure that only works for a confident, able-bodied commuter. That's not a modal-share plan, it's a modal-share aspiration with a vehicle-throughput plan underneath it.
So, concretely, on my watch:
1. Make AAA the floor, not the aspiration. Fewer shared bus-bike lanes presented as interim solutions on arterial corridors — full separation or don't claim the corridor as active-transportation infrastructure.
2. Extend scope where the City's own boundary is arbitrarily short. The St. Laurent EA stops at Industrial Avenue while density keeps building toward Smyth Road — the target doesn't stop there, so the network can't either.
3. Fix the highway-ramp gaps, not just the street segments. The 417 interchanges along St. Laurent are where the "complete" in Complete Streets currently breaks down entirely — high-speed slip lanes prioritizing vehicle throughput over the cyclists and pedestrians the plan claims to serve.
4. Design for the full range of riders, not just the fearless ones — infrastructure that also works for seniors and people with mobility limitations, and room for low-power EVs, not just traditional bikes.
5. Report progress against the target publicly, on a schedule — the same accountability standard I'm applying to every other file: don't let a good target substitute for a measurable one.
I'm a certified PMP and a trained data analyst. A target without a tracked delivery plan is just a communications strategy. My job, if elected, is to close that gap — and I've committed to one term to do it, not to manage the gap indefinitely.
Cyclist deaths and serious injuries on Ottawa roads remain a persistent problem. Do you believe in the Vision Zero tenet that no loss of life or serious injury on our roads is acceptable? If so, through which policies (road design, speed limits, enforcement, etc.) will you champion it in the next Road Safety Action Plan?
Yes, without qualification.
And I'd point out that supporting it "in principle" is the easy part — every candidate will say yes to that question.
The real test is whether you'll back it with design changes that actually change outcomes, even when they're politically uncomfortable for a specific intersection or a specific street.
The City's own published rationale for where it uses roundabouts already makes the safety case better than I could: a roundabout means a pedestrian crosses only two directions of slow-moving traffic instead of the multi-directional turning conflicts at a signal, and it removes the specific failure mode of a driver running a red light through a crossing pedestrian — something a signal can't design away.
That's the City's own logic, applied inconsistently.
So here's where I act.
Close the loop on gateway intersections the City has already flagged.
St. Laurent and Hemlock sits at the doorstep of a still-growing neighbourhood, and the City's own Beechwood Community Design Plan makes the same "parkway meets mainstreet" argument for that intersection that it already acted on a few hundred metres away at Rockcliffe Parkway and Confederation Boulevard.
I'd fold a roundabout feasibility study into the live St. Laurent Transit Priority Corridor EA now, while the corridor boundary is already open, not as a costlier retrofit after the fact.
1. Stop treating known risks as someone else's timeline. This ward has a five-year pattern of an "urgent" engineering finding sitting without funded action — I won't let road safety follow the same track record.
2. Make AAA cycling infrastructure the design floor, not a negotiable line item.
3. Shared bus-bike lanes on arterial corridors are a serious-injury risk waiting to happen, mixing bikes with 40-foot buses. Full physical separation, or don't count the corridor toward the safety target.
4. Sequence road-safety studies to actual growth, not lagging counts.
5. Wateridge Village is still being built out and is already generating enough traffic pressure for its own residents to push a council motion on speeding. I'd require projected build-out volumes to be factored into safety studies now, before the intersection is already failing.
6. Track it like a project, not a slogan.
Vision Zero needs a measurable delivery plan with public reporting against it — the same standard I apply to every file.
A target without a tracked plan is just a communications strategy, not a policy.
I've committed to four years only.
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What is your assessment of the current state of the City's (not the NCC's) cycling infrastructure in your ward? Its strengths and weaknesses?
Mixed, and I'll give you the honest breakdown rather than a talking point, because that's the standard I hold everyone else to.
Strengths: Where the City has actually built protected, purpose-designed intersections, it works — I've filmed and compared them myself. There are pockets in this ward that show the City knows how to do this correctly when it commits to it. The St. Laurent Transit Priority Corridor EA also has some genuinely good bones on paper: raised cycle tracks, protected intersection geometry at nodes like Donald Street, floating transit islands. That's real progress compared to nothing.
Weaknesses, and there are more of them than the City's messaging admits:
• Compare Coventry and St. Laurent to the good intersection nearby, and the gap is obvious. It's a mess — narrow, inconsistent, and clearly retrofitted around vehicle priority rather than designed for a cyclist from the start.
• The City's own plan still falls back on shared bus-bike lanes in tight commercial stretches instead of full AAA separation — mixing bikes with 40-foot buses is not safe infrastructure, it's a compromise dressed up as a solution.
• The 417 interchanges along St. Laurent remain a hard barrier. High-speed slip lanes prioritize vehicle throughput over the cyclists and pedestrians the plan claims to serve — that's not a design detail, it's the corridor's biggest unresolved safety gap.
• The EA's scope stops short. It ends at Industrial Avenue while housing density keeps building toward Smyth Road — a network that stops at an arbitrary administrative boundary isn't actually a network.
• Vehicle capacity is still protected over active transportation. Up to six to eight lanes preserved in key sections tells you where the real priority sits, regardless of the "Complete Street" label on the report cover.
And now there's a structural threat on top of all of this: Ontario's Bill 60 restricts municipalities from converting vehicle lanes into bike lanes — which is exactly the retrofit tool the City has relied on to build a connected, separated bike grid affordably. If that tool gets taken away provincially, Ward 13's gaps don't get filled, they get frozen in place.
So my assessment: the City knows what good design looks like — it's built some of it. What's missing is the discipline to apply that standard consistently, instead of treating AAA separation as negotiable whenever a corridor gets tight or contested. That's not a resourcing problem, it's a decision problem — which is exactly the kind of gap I built my platform around finding and closing.
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One of the consequences of the ban of speed cameras by the provincial government is that the Road Safety Action Plan has seen its budget reduced by 1/3. Will you pledge to increase the active transportation budget in order to build a true connected network and so that all of the most dangerous intersections (as identified in the March 2020 Cycling Safety Review of High-Volume Intersections Study; Staff Report; Consultant Report) can get safe infrastructure within the next term of Council?
Yes, and I'll tell you exactly what I'm pledging to, because vague budget commitments are how this file has been managed for six years already.
I checked the actual staff report, not just the headline. The March 2020 Cycling Safety Review screened 74 high-volume intersections down to 30, developed conceptual protected designs for 29 of them, and priced the total at roughly $32 million — Class D estimates, not including property acquisition, hydro burial, or signal costs, so the real number is higher. As of that report, there was no dedicated funding to implement any of it.
One location — Smyth at Riverside Hospital — got $810,000 combined from RSAP and Transportation Planning, against a conceptual cost of $1.5 million, meaning staff had to scale back the design just to fit the budget available.
The City's own low-cost safety program, CSIP, runs on $105,000 a year for 10 locations. That's the baseline this file was operating from before the province pulled speed camera revenue out of the Road Safety Action Plan and cut its budget by a third.
So here's my answer: yes, I'll pledge to increase the active transportation budget, but I want to be precise about what that pledge means, because "increase the budget" without a target is exactly the kind of soft commitment I've built my whole platform around calling out.
1. Fund the $32 million backlog on a fixed multi-year schedule, tied to the next term of Council, not left to compete year-to-year against every other capital ask with no protected allocation.
2. Replace the lost speed-camera revenue in the RSAP dollar-for-dollar from general capital, not just accept the one-third cut as the new baseline. The province creating a funding gap doesn't reduce the danger at these intersections — it just shifts who's responsible for closing it, and I think that's Council's job now.
3. Report publicly, intersection by intersection, against the 2020 list — which of the 30 are funded, which are designed, which are built, on a schedule the public can actually check. Right now that list exists but there's no public tracker holding the City to it.
4. Stop letting design-to-budget substitution become the norm. Smyth and Riverside got a scaled-back design to fit an insufficient budget — that's a symptom of underfunding, not a design choice, and it shouldn't be repeated silently at the next 29 locations.
I'm a certified PMP and a trained data analyst.
A capital list with no funding line and no public tracker isn't a plan, it's a wish list.
My job is to turn it into a schedule with money behind it — and to be honest with residents that this means real budget dollars.
What is your position on the content of the bikeshare feasibility report released in April 2026 and its proposed system (publicly-supported network of 90 docked stations and 900 bikes in Ottawa, as a start)? Do you support the public funding of this service?
I support it, with a specific condition attached, because the report itself hands me the exact reason to attach one:
Ward 13 isn't in the initial service area!
The study's own Table 16 lists "Montréal Road to St. Laurent Boulevard" and "Overbrook" as high-value destinations sitting just beyond the proposed 30 km² launch zone. So before I sign off on public dollars for this, my first question is the one nobody's asking: is Ward 13 funding a system on day one that it doesn't get to use on day one?
That's not a reason to oppose it. It's a reason to negotiate the terms, which is exactly the distinction I bring to every file — supporting the right thing in principle isn't the same as approving whatever version shows up in a staff report.
On the substance, the data in the feasibility study holds up. This isn't a speculative pitch — it's benchmarked against five peer systems (Toronto, Montréal, Québec City, Washington, Hamilton), and every one of them required public operating subsidy; none run on user fees alone, even mature systems in Toronto and Montréal only recover about 75% of operating costs from fees and sponsorship combined.
So the honest framing for residents is: yes, this needs public money, permanently, not just at launch — roughly $0.45M to $2.2M a year in public investment depending on scenario, on top of $11.7M-$13.4M in one-time capital.
Anyone who tells you bike share pays for itself hasn't read the report.
Given that, here's my position:
1. Support the system, on the condition that expansion into Ward 13 is written into the plan from day one — not left as a vague "future phase." The report already names the corridor. I want a committed timeline attached to it, not an aspiration.
2. Support public funding at the level the report says is actually required — the mixed-revenue model with real, ongoing operating subsidy, not a low-ball "best case" number presented to Council as if it's the expected case.
3. Push for the governance model and cost tracking to be transparent from the start. This region has already burned through two failed bike share systems — Capital BIXI and VeloGo — both undone by unclear governance and unrealistic self-funding assumptions. I'm not interested in a third failure because Council wouldn't be honest about the subsidy up front.
4. Insist Ward 13 residents aren't asked to help fund a service they can't yet ride. If expansion timing slips past a reasonable horizon, that's a legitimate equity question for a ward that's already carrying more than its share of downtown-adjacent truck traffic and infrastructure deferral on other files.
I'm a data analyst. The numbers in this study are solid and the peer-system lessons are honestly presented — including the uncomfortable ones about ongoing subsidy. My job is to make sure "regional system" doesn't quietly mean "everyone pays, only some wards ride," the way too many other files in this ward have gone.
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What do you think of winter cycling, and what would you do to ensure safe cycling infrastructure is maintained year-round, including winter plowing of bike lanes and pathways to the same standard as roads?
Many barriers can make access to safe cycling difficult: income, gender, age, race, disability, etc. How would you reduce those barriers and make sure those communities get equitable investment in safe cycling?
In winter I prefer my fat bike.
Honestly, before I list what I'd do, let me name where I'd start: with the data, not with a good-intentions statement.
You can't equitably invest in something you haven't measured, and right now most of Ottawa's cycling planning still gets scored on volume and connectivity, not on who's actually being left out.
A few concrete things I'd push for:
1. Design for the full range of riders, not the confident commuter.
I've said this on every cycling file I've worked on: AAA — All Ages and Abilities — infrastructure has to be the design floor, not an aspiration line in a staff report.
That means physically separated cycle tracks, not shared bus-bike lanes, because a shared lane only works for someone who's already comfortable riding next to a 40-foot bus.
Seniors, kids, and people with mobility limitations get excluded by design the moment "shared" is treated as good enough.
2. Use the equity data that already exists, and act on it.
The region's own Bike Share Feasibility Study built an explicit equity lens into its planning — mapping neighbourhoods with higher transportation-related barriers, and recommending subsidized memberships, adaptive cycles, and access options for people without a smartphone, credit card, or bank account.
That's the right instinct. My complaint isn't with the tool, it's that this same rigour needs to apply to every cycling infrastructure decision, not just the one program that happened to build it in.
3. Don't let equity-priority neighbourhoods sit outside the "initial phase." I've already flagged this on the bike share file specifically — parts of this ward, like the Montréal Road to St. Laurent corridor, are named in the study as high-value but left out of the launch service area.
If we let every program's "phase two" be where equity commitments quietly go to wait, we've built a system that's equitable on paper and sequential in practice. I want expansion into underserved corridors on a committed timeline, not a promise.
4. Build for people who aren't going to bike to work at 8am on a road bike. That includes low-power EVs and adaptive cycles, wider intersection clearances, and infrastructure that works for someone getting groceries, taking a kid to school, or managing a mobility limitation — not just the peak-commuter use case that most volume-based planning defaults to.
5. Track and report it. I'm a data analyst. If the City says it's investing equitably, I want a public number attached to that claim — dollars and kilometres of protected infrastructure delivered in equity-priority neighbourhoods, tracked the same way we'd track any other capital commitment. Otherwise "equity" is an aspirational value statement, not a plan.
The throughline across everything I've said on cycling this campaign is the same: good intentions in a policy document don't move a wheelchair, a stroller, or a senior on a bike through an unsafe intersection. Only design and funding do. That's where I'd put the focus.
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