ANNUAL REPORT ON CYCLING - 2022

City of Ottawa's 30km/h Design Toolbox

The City of Ottawa has committed to designing all new and reconstructed residential streets with a 30 km/h operating speed, and some wards in the city have seen their local speed limits reduced to 30 km/h. But simply putting up “30 km/h” signs on wide streets is not enough to actually change driving behaviour; street design is key.

City staff created a “30 km/h Design Toolbox” of design options to achieve lower driving speeds. Bike Ottawa took a deep dive into this toolbox and highlighted what we like and what could be better about these suggestions. Many toolbox suggestions are based on practical examples from around the world, like physically requiring slower speeds with chicanes, planter boxes, intersection bulb-outs, filtered permeability, or raised intersection crossings. But the toolbox also suggests using on-street parking as a traffic calming measure, and this is concerning: parked cars increase the risk of getting “doored,” blocking sight lines of people on sidewalks, and creating situations where people biking must weave in and out of traffic when not able to use the parking lane as a de facto bike lane. Parked cars are, in fact, a hazard, not a safety improvement, and the hazards far outweigh any marginal benefits of reducing driving speed.

An actual 30km/h street will make it intuitive for motorists to drive 30km/h or slower and will lead to a more comfortable setting where people feel safe riding a bicycle or taking a stroll. The new tools in the City’s Toolbox provide plenty of great design solutions to make slower streets a reality, but as with all traffic-calming projects, adequate funding is needed to make them an all-season reality.

Urban Design and Infrastructure

Revert Reds

The efforts to push to end revert reds and guarantee the green light for crossing the street was another important safety campaign that Bike Ottawa supported in 2022.

At the end of the January 26th, 2022, Transportation Committee, the motion to end all revert reds was deferred. Many councillors were concerned with revert reds, seeing the dangers, but were concerned with the “any and all” portion of the motion (removing revert reds entirely from any and all signals). Questions about why staff could not look at more specific locations, such as priority bike crossings, were posed. Could we not try those intersections to begin with? Other councillors still supported “education” on the yellow dots (the dots you sometimes see at crossings, but not always!). For the record, we do not believe these campaigns are effective for people on bikes, just as they are not for drivers and people who use sidewalks. Safe Systems means a design that is intuitive to the user and does not need extra signage.

It's Now Easier To Get Around In Winter!

Municipal Election 2022

In light of the 2022 Municipal election, Bike Ottawa released its plan for Ottawa to become the next bike city. We were asking candidates in the upcoming election to support our 2|4|10 Plan:

1. Within 2 years, the City will reconfigure the 29 High-volume Intersections, create a City-owned Bike Share to expand multi-modal transportation, and end revert reds for people biking, walking, and rolling.
2. Within four years, the City will build a four-season bicycle network so that everyone is within 1 km of separated biking facilities, thus connecting people to where they need to go across Ottawa and creating a sustainable transportation app that helps develop routes for people and includes multi-modal transportation considerations.
3. Within 10 years, the City will reach Vision Zero – zero fatalities on our streets. No more people will be killed while moving around our City- whatever mode of transportation they use.

City of Ottawa Transportation Master Plan

Bike Ottawa contributed important feedback on the City of Ottawa’s Draft Transportation Master Plan throughout 2022. Let’s start with a look at the broader feedback Bike Ottawa had for the draft plan, including highlighting several positive aspects of it:

1. Bike Ottawa believes the city needs to put the needs of the most vulnerable road users first in order to more boldly reimagine how space is allocated on city streets. This goes beyond building new active transportation infrastructure but also allocating existing road space to sustainable transportation modes.
2. Bike Ottawa is pleased that the city has developed a strong equity lens for planning transportation. We are also encouraged to see that the TMP acknowledges the need to prioritize neighbourhoods where public transit and active transportation options may not be as equitable as other parts of the city.
3. The TMP creates important links between active transportation and transit, by acknowledging the role active transportation can play in expanding the catchment for transit, and making it more accessible.
4. Bike Ottawa was disappointed that the TMP only contemplates an expansion to 80km of winter-maintained bike infrastructure by 2030, despite the current success of the winter biking network.
5. Bike Ottawa supports using street designs that prioritize active transportation over private automobile use, including woonerfs and bike-first streets. We encourage the city to look at similar measures, including using filtered permeability to allow active transportation users to make more direct trips while discouraging private automobile trips and using super blocks.

What About Local Streets?

The City of Ottawa’s New Draft Transportation Master Plan (TMP) has shifted significantly. Instead of recognizing cycling routes as only those roads identified in the Master Plan, it acknowledges that all new collectors and arterial roads will now have cycle tracks and protected intersections and that all existing Collectors and Arterial roads will be upgraded to separated cycling facilities.

However, there are no plans to address cycling on local roads. The city believes lower speed limits on local roads preclude the need for separate biking infrastructure. However, other factors such as traffic volume and cyclist ability may still prevent cyclists from using those roads for safety reasons. While not all local roads require separate bike infrastructure, Bike Ottawa is asking that segregated cycling infrastructure be provided on Local streets where required to create continuous and direct connections to destinations such as public transit stops or stations, schools, public parks, pathways, recreation centres, public buildings and institutions and commercial areas, where a Local street provides a direct connection between collectors and arterials, or where the traffic volume is so high that a cyclist’s travel choices are impacted due to safety concerns.

Communities, Connections and Commuting

The equity policy of the 2021 Transportation Master Plan (TMP) update sets as one of its goals to “support everyone’s ability to work, participate in public life, and meet daily needs.”

Annex A of the plan identifies “priority neighbourhoods,” which have “high concentrations of residents who are socially and economically vulnerable” and seeks to improve public and active transit infrastructure in those areas. However, how these neighbourhoods are delineated is often inconsistent with the routes that commuter cyclists living in them take to access their places of work and other daily necessities efficiently.

The failure to safely connect active transport commuters with key destinations is a pervasive issue within urban planning, but it adversely affects some segments of the population more than others. When we look at the City of Ottawa’s list of candidate projects, there is very little to connect suburban “priority neighbourhoods” with the daily necessities of their residents.

Bluesfest Bike Parking

Bike Ottawa reran the RBC Bluesfest Bike Park this year. The service offers those who rode their bike to Bluesfest a safe location for locking up their rides. The Bike Park is free, but they did collect donations (suggested $2), which go to Bike Ottawa and Bluesfest’s educational programmes: Blues in the Schools (BITS) and Be in the Band (BITB).