#559 One more time...Cycling In Ottawa

Where They Meet

I ride. The danger isn't the lane. It's the seam where cars, bikes and people on foot have to share the same few metres.

I've owned four bikes since 2012, and I organized a Critical Mass ride down St-Laurent Boulevard. Anyone who rides regularly knows that a stretch of protected lane feels calm until the next intersection, and then every sense you have switches on. That moment is the design problem.

Ottawa has plenty of road where cars, bikes and pedestrians each have their own space, and those stretches are mostly fine. People get hurt where the three meet: a driver turning across a bike lane, a bus passenger stepping off into a rider's path, a pathway hitting a parkway with only paint to protect you. Those seams are where the City needs to be most aggressive, and where it is usually least.

A typical arterial intersection. The lane is separated for the whole block, then the separation ends exactly where the conflicts begin.

The seams, and what fixes them

Seam	What goes wrong	What fixes it
Right turns	Fast, wide corners let drivers turn without slowing or looking beside them	Tight corner radii, raised crossings, bike and pedestrian signal head start
Driveways	Every driveway is a crossing of the lane	Consolidate driveways, continuous sidewalk and lane surface across them
Bus stops	Passengers step off straight into the bike lane	Boarding island with a marked crossing
Parked cars	Opening doors reach into the lane	Buffer strip, or move the parking
Path-to-road crossings	Pathways meet fast arterials with only paint	Signals or beacons, and one agency accountable for the crossing
Where it ends	The lane stops and the rider is dropped into traffic	A designed transition, or don't build the fragment

A protected lane is only as safe as its worst intersection.

What "aggressive" should mean

1. Inventory the seams. Map every conflict point on the arterial network, rank them using crash and near-miss data, and publish the list.
2. Fix the worst ones fast. Concrete curbs, bollards and planters can go in within weeks. Waiting for the next full reconstruction leaves the hazard in place for a decade.
3. Slow the turn. Tighter corners and signal phasing do more than any sign.
4. Give each crossing one owner. Many of the worst crossings sit between the City, the NCC and the province. When three agencies each control part of one corner, the hazard becomes nobody's job. Council should assign a single accountable owner and a decision deadline.
5. Use 311 as safety infrastructure. Let residents flag a near miss or a blocked lane where it happened, and publish the map.

Judge it by outcomes

"Kilometres of bike lane added" is an output, and it can include paint on the edge of a curb lane. What residents need is an outcome: how many of the 25 most hazardous interfaces are fixed by the end of the term, how many crashes occurred at them before and after, and how many people now use those routes. Report it every year, good or bad.

Ward 13

I've proposed a protected path on the St-Laurent median, designed like the old Brooklyn parkway paths rather than a narrow centre lane squeezed against turning traffic. A lane like that only works if the seams are solved: how a rider crosses Hemlock, how someone on foot reaches the LRT station, and who is accountable for the Aviation Parkway crossings. That is a council decision, not a design-manual problem.

It also has to work for the rider who isn't a confident commuter: a senior on an e-bike, a parent with a cargo bike, a teenager heading to school. If the seams aren't safe for them, the lane isn't finished.

Ask your candidate:

Which dangerous interface in the ward will you fix first, by what date, and who will you hold responsible if it isn't done?