The City of Ottawa is proceeding to install speed humps on MacLaren Street this fall, two decades after announcing the planned traffic-calming project. Cassandra Wood, Centretown NewsA traffic calming project in Centretown — the construction of seven speed humps along MacLaren Street between Bank Street and Bronson Avenue — is seeing the light of day after spending almost two decades on the books.
Ottawa’s Area Traffic Management program is catching up on some long-pending Centretown projects, thanks to increased funding over the past five years. But the MacLaren Street humps are among the very last measures to be implemented from a Centretown traffic calming plan drafted in 1997, according to Vivi Chi, the city’s manager of transportation planning.
A child born that year would have grown to adulthood and perhaps even left the neighbourhood without experiencing the go-slow street envisioned during former Ottawa mayor Jacquelin Holzman’s tenure. Construction is finally set to begin this month and wrap up by the year’s end.
Speed humps are gradual inclines intended to slow speeding vehicles and increase driver awareness.
They cause discomfort to reckless drivers and can damage cars moving at high speeds, but they are designed such that at safe and legal residential street speeds, they are smooth to travel over.
“For several years, the (traffic) program had not received a whole lot of funding. There were not a lot of projects able to be implemented,” said Heidi Cousineau, a City of Ottawa traffic program manager. “For the last few years, we have been getting some more funding, and so we’ve been able to really trim down our old and waiting measures.”
The financial boost came in Oct. 2011, when City Council approved $2.5 million in funding to clear its backlog of previously approved measures. This was followed up with another $950,000 in 2015 and $650,000 more in 2016.
Prior to this funding, many projects as simple as installing speed humps couldn’t move forward. Some approved measures, including the MacLaren humps, would gather dust for years.
Traffic management projects are not completed on a first-identified, first-finished basis, explained Cousineau.
The city ranks projects based on weighted points and constantly updates the list of factors they consider most important. As new studies are submitted, the list of prioritized projects is rearranged, meaning older projects can be pushed down the to-do list.
Cousineau said the MacLaren Street project is part of a larger wave of in-development Centretown traffic calming measures, along with other projects. The anticipated cost of the overall project is almost $200,000.
Of this amount, Cousineau estimates that about $50,000 is going to MacLaren Street.
Although traffic on MacLaren Street has not been identified as a specific concern by the Centretown Citizens Community Association, CCCA vice-president Tom Whillans said he’s all for discouraging commuter traffic on tertiary residential streets.
“We support any traffic calming or restrictions to high-speed traffic through residential areas in the urban core,” he said.
Whillans said this particular stretch of MacLaren Street — adjacent to Dundonald Park, an important green space in the downtown neighbourhood — would certainly benefit from increased traffic calming.