#447 Hemlock and St. Laurent - circle it

Two Gateways, One Fix: The Case for a Traffic Circle at St-Laurent and Hemlock

A bookend to the traffic circle already on the table for Vanier Parkway and Beechwood — and a sequencing question Wateridge Village's growth makes urgent.

The proposal

Two intersections mark the north and south gateways of the same green corridor running through the Beechwood/St-Laurent area: Vanier Parkway at Beechwood Avenue on the south end, and St-Laurent Boulevard at Hemlock Road on the north end. Both are places where a landscaped, parkway-style road meets a mainstreet-scale arterial. Both are places where the City's own planning documents have already recognized that the standard signalized intersection isn't the right tool. I'm proposing a traffic circle at each — treating the corridor's two gateways the same way, instead of fixing one and leaving the other as an afterthought.

This isn't a new idea — the City already floated half of it

The Vanier Parkway/Beechwood circle isn't something I invented. It came directly out of the City's Beechwood Avenue Transportation Corridor brainstorming process, which listed "adding a traffic circle at the Vanier Parkway intersection" alongside other corridor ideas. The City has known this intersection deserved special treatment for years. It just never got built.

What's less noticed is that the City's own Beechwood Community Design Plan makes the identical argument for the Hemlock end of the corridor — just not about the St-Laurent intersection specifically. The plan's own language:

"Parkways — the Vanier Parkway, the Rockcliffe Parkway and, to a lesser extent, Hemlock Avenue — are sweeping, limited access roads surrounded by green landscapes… the place where Beechwood meets Hemlock is similar in nature to where the Rockcliffe Parkway meets Confederation Boulevard. It is at the latter location that the National Capital Commission and the City of Ottawa have built a roundabout."

In other words: the City has already built a roundabout on this exact logic — parkway meets mainstreet, treat it as a gateway — a few hundred metres away at Rockcliffe Parkway and Confederation Boulevard. The reasoning that justifies a circle at Beechwood/Vanier applies just as directly one intersection north, where Hemlock — the same "parkway-style" road named in the City's own plan — meets St-Laurent Boulevard. That's the corridor's other bookend, and it's the point where St-Laurent's speed limit steps down from 50 to 60 km/h zones into the slower, denser section that runs past Manor Park.

Why it matters more now: Wateridge

St-Laurent and Hemlock sits at the doorstep of Wateridge Village, the former CFB Rockcliffe lands now being built out as a new, still-growing neighbourhood. This isn't a hypothetical future traffic increase — Wateridge's own community association has already documented resident concerns about speeding on their internal streets, concerns serious enough that they pushed a council motion to improve transit service in the area. A neighbourhood that's still under construction is already generating enough traffic pressure to need council intervention. That pressure funnels toward St-Laurent at exactly the intersection this proposal targets, and Wateridge isn't finished growing.

That's the sequencing argument. We have a documented pattern in this ward of treating known problems as someone else's timeline — the St-Laurent LRT tunnel sat on an "urgent" 2020 inspection finding for over five years before repair funding moved. I don't want the north gateway of this corridor to become the next multi-year deferral, discovered only after Wateridge is fully built out and the intersection is already failing.

The safety case, on the City's own terms

The City of Ottawa's own roundabout guidance is explicit about why this matters for a corridor with a growing residential population on one end and a cemetery, seniors' community, and mixed-use towers on the other:

• At a roundabout, a pedestrian crosses only two sections of one-way traffic moving at slow speed — not the multi-directional turning conflicts of a signalized intersection.
• Roundabouts remove the risk of a driver running a red light through a crossing pedestrian, which signals can't design away.
• Roundabouts keep traffic moving at lower, more consistent speeds through the intersection itself, rather than the stop-and-accelerate cycle of a signal.

None of this is me asserting national collision statistics onto a specific corner. It's the City's own published rationale for why it uses roundabouts at all — applied consistently to a corridor where the City has already used that rationale once, at Confederation Boulevard, and floated it once more, at Vanier/Beechwood, without ever closing the loop at the corridor's other end.

What I'm not claiming

I don't have site-specific collision or volume data for St-Laurent and Hemlock, and I won't pretend I do. That's exactly the kind of study the City should be running now, while the St-Laurent Boulevard Transit Priority Corridor EA — which already covers the Hemlock-to-Innes stretch — is active, rather than as a bolt-on after Wateridge's build-out is complete and retrofitting gets more expensive and more disruptive.

The ask

• Fold a St-Laurent/Hemlock roundabout feasibility study into the live St-Laurent Transit Priority Corridor EA — the corridor boundary already starts at Hemlock, so the study scope doesn't need to be reopened, just extended to this intersection design.
• Formally revisit the Vanier Parkway/Beechwood circle the City's own Beechwood corridor process already put on the table, instead of letting it stay a shelved brainstorming item.
• Require Wateridge's projected build-out traffic volumes to be factored into both studies, not treated as a separate problem to be discovered later.

Peter Karwacki is running for Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) in Ottawa's October 2026 municipal election.