The Commute Smart Challenge, a City of Ottawa initiative that aimed to get Ottawa residents to leave their cars at home and walk, cycle or bus on their daily commutes, came to a close this week, bringing to light the gaps in the city’s current transportation infrastructure.
The challenge was a rebranding of the annual Sustainable Transportation Week, a campaign that needed to be refreshed, says Kathleen Wilker, of EnviroCentre, the non-profit organization that co-ordinates the event.
Wilker, EnviroCentre’s program co-ordinator for transportation demand management, says this year’s campaign focused on getting residents to build upon habits they already have.
“We’re trying to take what people are already doing and what is working for them and get them to try taking it a step further,” says Wilker. Information booths were set up at park-and-ride lots around the city to encourage people to try biking to the transit stations and to use multiple modes of sustainable transportation in one commute.
The campaign’s focus on multimodal trips is something that should be central in Ottawa’s transportation planning, says Hans Moor, president of the local advocacy group Citizens for Safe Cycling.
Moor says he thinks initiatives such as the Commute Smart Challenge are important because they reach out to people who are not usually cycling. But he says he believes the city has to do more in the planning stages to ensure that residents across the city can comfortably cycle and walk to transit stations.
Currently, cycling represents less than 0.85 per cent of all transportation spending by the city. Moor’s group wants to see that number rise to 2.5 per cent, which would be $20 million annually.
In his homeland of the Netherlands, Moor says 50 per cent of the population is only three or four kilometres away from a train station, reflecting a well-designed infrastructure that he says Ottawa is capable of mirroring, but which will ultimately come down to effective planning.
“The city should design it in a way that people actually prefer to take mass transit, rather than just all jumping in a car and getting crabby in traffic jams,” says Moor.
Citizens for Safe Cycling is pressing the city to invest more in cycling infrastructure, as 67 per cent of Ottawa residents already ride or would like to but are concerned about safety, according to a City of Ottawa survey conducted last year.
Ottawa resident Stephanie Chaw bikes to work in Centretown every day and says there should be more bike lanes in the downtown community.
The city’s current transportation blueprint includes plans to develop a cross-town bikeway that would connect Confederation Boulevard (at Wellington Street), the business district, Centretown and the Glebe.
Bikeways would likely be constructed on O’Connor Street and Metcalfe Street, but the project is still in its early stages, with a public consultation held this past summer and another planned for early 2015.