By Jim Donnelly
“You know it’s illegal, right?” Inga Petri laughs.
The president of the Ottawa Urban Inline Skating Club is talking about her sport excitedly, like someone who knows she’s gotten away with something.
Her club — the only organized, competitive and recreational inline skating association in town — holds ‘TGIF’ group skating events through Centretown once a week from May until November. Every Friday, a pack of anywhere from five to 30 helmet-clad skaters glide their way through the city’s downtown core.
There’s only one catch. It’s completely against the law.
“The bylaws in Ottawa are such that you’re not allowed to skate on the road, and you’re not allowed to skate on the sidewalk,” she says, still smiling. “But I’ve never gotten a ticket doing either one.”
Petri, who lives on McLeod Street, has been inline skating in Centretown for about five years and has been with the club for most of its two-year lifespan, during which it has grown from a founding membership of four to a group of more than 80. She says the sport is becoming so popular the club has had to place limits on its membership .
“We’ve been extremely conservative in terms of encouraging growth,” she says. “There’s thousands of inline skaters in Ottawa but it’s hard to serve all of them.”
She blames the relative ambiguity of the sport for its legality problem.
“I guess we’re not a vehicle, and we’re not pedestrians so we’re kind of in a no-man’s land. So skating in Ottawa, while it’s great fun, is one of those entirely non-sanctioned activities.”
The only areas where it is legal to skate in Ottawa year-round are the paved bike paths running throughout the city. In summer, the National Capital Commission holds Sunday bike days in which sections of four major parkways, including Colonel By Drive and the Gatineau Park Parkway, are open only to cyclists and inline skaters during the morning.
City representatives say the regulations may be somewhat outdated.
“These provisions are 20 years old and didn’t consider inline skating, simply because it didn’t exist,” says Susan Jones, bylaw services director for the City of Ottawa. She maintains skaters won’t face legal problems if they follow the rules of the road.
“As long as it’s being done in a safe manner, then (skaters) are fine. They have to comply with the Highway Traffic Act.”
But for many Ottawa participants, getting the sport recognized is a matter of principle. Jim Shearer has been skating in Ottawa for 10 years and says the issue has been put to the city by local skaters in the past.
“About four or five years ago we tried to get it legalized,” he says. “We did a lot of pushing, but ran into a lot of problems.”
Petri, 33, says things may change now that there’s an organized skating club in Ottawa willing to put pressure on the city.
“I doubt that anyone at the city level has ever heard anything about inline skating, and as long as nothing is raised there’s no issue,” she says.
“But we’re the first organized body that could go to them.”
The sheer number of people who skate in Centretown, she says, should be enough for council to take notice. “We’re thinking about how we can create an interface with the city to address some of these issues.
“Something needs to change. People do it, and they do it a lot.”