Two Parkways, No Beacon
Rideau-Rockcliffe is bordered, cut through, and in places defined by two federal parkways: the Aviation Parkway and the Sir George-Étienne Cartier Parkway. Both are fast roads — 60 km/h posted limits, wide sightlines, minimal pedestrian infrastructure — and both cross paths with places where people on foot have no real choice but to cross them. Neither has a pedestrian-activated flashing beacon. As far as the public record shows, none has ever been installed anywhere in the ward over the past seven years while King has been in office.
That's not a coincidence. It's a jurisdiction problem, and it's worth being precise about why.
Aviation Parkway at La Cité collégiale
Aviation Parkway runs along the eastern edge of Manor Park and Wateridge Village, past La Cité collégiale, the Montfort Hospital, and CMHC's national headquarters — three of the largest single trip-generators in the ward. Students, hospital staff, patients and visitors, and federal employees all have reason to cross this road daily. The Manor Park Community Association said as much directly in its own submission to the City's Transportation Master Plan update: safe pedestrian and cyclist access in this corridor is effectively non-existent, and the area's transit and pedestrian pressures are only going to grow as Wateridge Village build-out continues and Hemlock Road reopens east of Aviation.
A rapid-flashing beacon crossing near La Cité isn't a nice-to-have. It's infrastructure that should have been paired with the growth this council has already approved around it.
With the plans for the new East End Crossing progressing these kinds of improvements are essential. Your councillor must be imaginative, proactive and strident.
Birch and the Sir George-Étienne Cartier Parkway
Further west, the Sir George-Étienne Cartier Parkway runs along the Ottawa River through New Edinburgh and Rockcliffe Park, connecting to some of the ward's most-used recreational pathway and cycling links. The intersection at Birch has a documented collision history — it's shown up in traffic incident logs going back years — on a stretch where pedestrians and cyclists moving between the river pathway network and the neighbourhood have to cross a 60 km/h federal road with no beacon, and in many stretches, no signal at all.
Why nothing has been built
Both parkways are owned and maintained by the National Capital Commission, not the City of Ottawa. That matters, because it means a city councillor can't simply direct staff to install a beacon at either location — it requires the City to formally request it, and the NCC to agree to fund and build it on federal land. That's a real constraint.
It's also exactly the kind of file where a councillor's job is to be the one pushing that request forward, publicly, on the record, year after year, until it happens.
I haven't found any public evidence — in newsletters, committee minutes, or the councillor's own detailed self-reported achievements list, which is otherwise granular enough to itemize individual stop signs and bus shelters — that this advocacy has happened for either location. That's the gap. Not that the City unilaterally failed to build something it never had sole authority to build, but that the file doesn't appear to have been actively pushed with the one partner who could actually build it.
The Aviation Parkway file just stopped being theoretical
Aviation Parkway isn't just a corridor with a pedestrian-safety gap — it's the proposed western landing point for the sixth interprovincial crossing at Kettle Island. That project is no longer a shelved 2013 idea. The NCC's Board approved an updated Long-Term Integrated Interprovincial Crossings Plan in November 2025, and Public Services and Procurement Canada opened a public comment period on the project's Initial Project Description on September 1, 2026, as part of the formal federal impact assessment process. A second round of design consultations is expected before the end of this year.
That timeline matters for the crossing at La Cité specifically. If the bridge proceeds, Aviation Parkway is where truck and commuter volume from a new river crossing would land before continuing south — the same stretch that already has no safe pedestrian crossing near one of the ward's largest trip generators. Montfort Hospital raised this exact concern more than a decade ago, warning that added traffic on Aviation Parkway could delay ambulances. Whatever anyone thinks of the bridge itself, the corridor's pedestrian and emergency-access mitigation needs don't disappear if the file moves forward without them being negotiated in.
This is the part of the file that actually requires a councillor's attention right now: not relitigating whether the bridge should exist, but making sure that if it advances, Ward 13's terms — including a pedestrian crossing at La Cité — are on the table during this comment period, not asked for after the design is locked. An opposition-only position doesn't get you a seat at that table. A council that overrides ward-level objections 16-9 has shown it will build regardless; the leverage is in shaping mitigation now, while PSPC and the NCC are still collecting input, not in relitigating the premise after the fact.
What I'd do differently
This is a jurisdictional-coordination problem, and it needs a structural fix, not a press release. That means:
- A formal, public City request to the NCC to conduct pedestrian-volume and collision-history reviews at both locations, using the same warrant criteria the City already applies to its own PXO program.
- Tying that request explicitly to approved growth — Wateridge Village, Manor Park intensification — so it's framed as a condition of development the NCC has already been a partner to, not a discretionary ask.
- Publishing the status of that request, and any NCC response, so residents can see whether the file is moving or stalled — rather than finding out only when construction crews show up, or don't.
- Submitting the Aviation Parkway crossing explicitly as mitigation input during PSPC's current Initial Project Description comment period — the file is open right now, not hypothetically down the road.
None of this requires waiting for a full council term to pass. It requires someone willing to put the ask on paper and keep it in front of the NCC until there's an answer.
— Peter Karwacki, candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)
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