The City of Ottawa has opened a new section of the Laurier Avenue bikeway between Albert Street and Bay Street, but local cyclists say more improvements could be made to the city’s cycling infrastructure.
The new section includes a raised 1.5-metre wide bike track and sidewalk on Laurier Avenue between Bronson Avenue and Percy Street.
“This project creates a link along the east-west bikeway to connect the Laurier segregated bike lanes with the existing multi-use pathway on the north side of Albert Street,” says a press release from the City of Ottawa.
Cycle Cities, a recent report by the Pembina Institute, compared cycling networks in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver and Ottawa.
The report showed although 100 per cent of Ottawa’s rapid transit stations are within 400 metres of a bike path, Ottawa ranked last when it came to cycling routes to get to the downtown core.
“Within the urban core of Ottawa,” the report says, “there are less than (two kilometres) of physically separated bicycle lanes.”
In early November, the Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict released the Cycle In report – a “citizen-led initiative” to look at bike routes to and from the downtown core.
To get their results, teams of cyclists took 20 different routes within approximately 10 kilometres of downtown.
Each team had to record their findings including what was good about their ride and what could be improved.
Don Grant, executive director of Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict, says the report showed Ottawa has excellent bike routes for cyclists but that none of the 20 routes were separate bicycle infrastructure the entire route.
“There’s bike lanes, there’s segregated lanes, there’s multi-use pathways but for each of those 20 routes, cyclists had to get into traffic and out of traffic again,” says Grant.
He says that’s okay for experienced cyclists but riding on roadways includes risks such as being struck by a car door – also known as ‘dooring’ – and the speed of vehicles.
Heather Shearer, secretary for Bike Ottawa, an advocacy group for Ottawa cyclists, is an avid rider who uses her bike as her main mode of transportation.
“We have a wonderful network of paths here, you can go all over the city and usually find a route that’s safe and comfortable, but we certainly do have a few missing connections in town and I know that the city’s working hard to address some of those gaps,” she says.
However, Shearer says she has lived all across Canada and calls Ottawa “one of the best cities for cycling.”
Shearer says having routes such as the Laurier Avenue bikeway in the city that are maintained during the winter months makes it easier for cyclists to travel across town.
“You feel like you’re doing so in a safe way and it takes away a lot of the stress of riding in traffic,” she says.
Shearer adds, even though the city is making steps to ensure cyclists’ safety, “you could have 90 per cent of your ride being on wonderful routes but if 10 per cent of is feeling dangerous, it really ruins the whole trip.”
Grant says transportation planners need to find solutions to these “pinch points.”
“A pinch point is any place where, as cyclists, we’re forced into a single channel from a number of pathways,” says Grant.
One example of a pinch point, he says, is the Bank Street Bridge near Billings Bridge Shopping Centre.
“That particular bridge isn’t very safe for cyclists. It’s also a heritage bridge, so (the city) can’t just add a platform on. So, they need to come up with a solution,” says Grant.
At the closest intersection to the bridge, on Bank Street and Riverside Drive, is a ghost-bike memorial for Meg Dussault, a cyclist who was killed in July 2013 in a collision with a cement truck.
“Maybe what they’ll have to do is twin it with a pedestrian-cycling bridge right beside it that will allow us to cross safely, get to the other side and go about our way,” he recommends.
Grant says, “What I know is (the city has) gotten more funding, they’re on-track with their current projects and every time they release a new piece of infrastructure, we cyclists flock to it. So we embrace the new infrastructure as it comes on board.”