Centretown residents who want to get their driver’s license can no longer practise driving near the Walkley Road DriveTest centre after a ban was approved by city council earlier this month.
In February, River Ward Coun. Maria McRae introduced a motion to ban driving instruction in residential areas near the centre.
She cited complaints from residents who had “serious safety concerns” about student drivers practising on their streets.
“These cars come all the time, so you don’t know when something’s going to go wrong,” says Norman Payne, a resident of the area. “They’ve run over pets, they’ve almost run into people . . . all kinds of things you can imagine!”
Payne adds that he and other community members have been trying to reach out to the driving schools for the past 10 years.
“We’ve tried to get them to meet with us. No one ever came. We did that through city hall with a formal letter sent out to all the driving schools, and not one of them replied.”
The area near the Walkley Road test centre attracts student drivers from across Ottawa, including those registered with Above The Best Driving School near Richmond Road and Moodie Drive in Ottawa’s west end.
Above The Best used to have another location on Dalhousie Street, just outside Centretown, until it closed several years ago. But the school says it still serves many residents from the area.
Muttulingam Thambirajah, owner of Above The Best, was unaware of the ban until he was informed about it by this reporter. But Thambirajah says he is not concerned. “We have lots of options! (The ban is) not affecting our business at all.”
Thambirajah acknowledges that he has brought his students to the area around the test centre, but says there are other locations where they can practise.
“We can go to some other places. We don’t have to go to that area. Wherever (the customers) want, we will take them,” he says.
The area around the test centre is a popular practice spot and many student drivers will be forced out once the ban is official, says Linda Anderson, chief of the city’s bylaw services.
Anderson says they can practise anywhere else in the city, “preferably in their own neighbourhoods.”
The drive-test centre on Walkley Road does 40,000 road tests a year, Anderson says.
“We can’t legally force the province not to do the road test there. However, every driving school is taking their students once, sometimes twice, sometimes three times around the duplicate course that the drive test centre uses to do their test.”