Driving downtown may not be as dangerous as it seems

By: Brandi Awad and Greg Guevara

Though Centretown is flooded with buses, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and hundreds of pedestrians daily, the roads appear to be much safer than those in other parts of the city.

In fact, one of its most prominent intersections, Lyon and Wellington Street, barely cracks the top 100 collision intersection sites in Ottawa, according to city data.

Lyon and Wellington was number 96 on the 2016 list and saw 15 collisions last year – none of which included pedestrians or cyclists.  Instead, major roads outside of the downtown core such as Hunt Club Road, were the collision hot spots.

In first place was Hunt Club & Riverside Drive with 43 collisions. Following close behind was Prince of Wales Drive & West Hunt Club with 36, and West Hunt Club and Woodroofe Avenue with 35. The data was collected from Open Data Ottawa.

Ryan Clancey, owner of Ottawa Towing Company, said that the majority of his business comes from outside of the city’s centre because most of the accidents that occur downtown are minor due to its congestion and lower speed limits.

He said he believes that major roads, such as Hunt Club, experience a higher collision rate due to their higher speed limit.

“If I had to make a recommendation, it would be to reduce Hunt Club to 60 kilometres from 80 kilometres when entering high volume intersections,” Clancey said.

Though the City of Ottawa does not plan to lower the speed limit at the top collision spot, they have implemented “safety improvement programs” to target high-collision rate intersections, said the director of traffic services, Phil Landry.

These programs identify collision hot spots that would benefit from improvements and seeks to fix them – whether that be as simple as a new sign or pavement markings to modifications that are integrated into larger scale projects in the area, Landry said.

However, for some drivers this isn’t enough.

Mona Kutiy, a 20-year-old uOttawa student who frequently drives both downtown and in the city’s outskirts, described Hunt Club as a “mess” and said she isn’t seeing any of the city’s efforts. But, she admitted she was surprised to see downtown locations so low on the list.

“Drivers are just really reckless and it’s so busy all of the time, so you think that downtown would be a lot higher up.”