I’ll continue to update this article as things with this project progress. Meanwhile, you can go back and read the main article about city projects getting hung up on the tiniest details and from small complaints that have been considered before decisions are made, but are still totally capable of completely blocking important work being done in our city.
Orleans Blvd / Jeanne d’Arc Timeline
August 2026:
On August 19, 2026, the city of Ottawa announced with the federal government that money from the federal Active Transportation Fund would be used to help pay for a road renewal, safe, protected intersections, and a bike lane retrofit for sections of Orleans Blvd and Jeanne d’Arc Blvd N in Orleans.
I appeared in an interview that evening on the news: New bike lanes coming to Orléans in federal, City of Ottawa deal, and I was very excited to hear this would be coming. I do wish the city could build it the way we wanted to while making the roadways narrower and therefore safer, but that can’t happen after Ontario Bill 60’s changes to the Highway Traffic Act.
It will take 1-2 more years of planning to get this project’s work started, since finished plans needed to be scrapped, but at least there’s money to do the project now. This work will be a great start to a network of safe protected infrastructure for active transportation, allowing more people to drive less and spend more time and energy in their communities.
Support The New Orleans
The last year has been a rollercoaster of ‘hurry up and wait’ when it comes to road renewal projects on Orléans and Jeanne d’Arc Boulevards in my community. This is a tangent from my original piece about how a small number of complaints or naysayers can derail or block a project even if any contention is something that was already considered and dealt with during the planning stage of a project.
I want to walk you through a timeline of all the different steps and things that have affected this project since I started paying attention to it a couple of years ago (it has been a topic of discussion off and on for probably a decade or two, to be honest…long before my time).
November 2025:
Late October, shortly after Ontario Bill 60 was announced, my Community Association was asked for a phone call to update us on the fact that these both these projects were being shelved or sent back to the drawing board. Due to the fact that these road renewals would impact traffic lanes, they were going to be made illegal in Ontario by this new bill. We did a whole lot of media and press about the issues with this bill, but it is nevertheless going to be law now that any road project that both puts in bike lanes and removes vehicle traffic lanes is illegal in Ontario.
This is a completely ridiculous law, for a number of reasons you can read about from the links above, but what it effectively means is that because it took so long for the city to get its act together and agree on how this project should look and work, we now get nothing. This is also true of the separate but related Orleans Blvd 174 overpass project, where because we didn’t remove extra vehicle lanes before November 2025, now we can’t (unless we just do it in a way where bike lanes aren’t involved at all).
It’s really unfortunate it has come to this, the hurry up and wait approach to bike lane projects (as well as very limited funds for such projects to begin with) has meant that we took too long and now such projects are illegal.
October 2025:
In October 2025, we got the results from the report filed back in March about speed limit harmonization on Jeanne d’Arc. As expected (if you were paying attention), that meant that the new speed limit for a full 5 km stretch of Jeanne d’Arc Blvd would be 40 kph the whole way, as the road passes three schools, multiple parks and residential neighbourhoods. Drivers will barely feel an effect, driving the whole thing at the old speed limit vs the new one will take at most 1 minute, 15 seconds longer, which feels like a lot but is effectively nothing. The new speed limit signs are in place as of November 2025.
However, at the same time this happened, Ontario Bill 56 went through the Ontario legislature. This bill, in part, banned speed cameras across Ontario, mainly because vandals in Toronto were illegally cutting these cameras down. Jeanne d’Arc had a speed camera that was now being turned off mid-November 2025, meaning that lanes that are very wide and unnecessarily spacious can be sped through without risking a ticket, and taking money for the Ottawa Road Safety Action Plan budget away from the city to make further safety improvements. The province did agree to send cities bigger road signs though, as we all know it’s low sign visibility that causes speeding.
Spring/Summer 2025:
As the year progressed, we continued to follow up with councillor Dudas, who over and over again noted that she still hadn’t heard anything about the plans that are now coming up to a year old as we head into September. Bits and pieces of the story make it through the grapevine from time to time, but there’s no clear picture about why it’s taking so long and how anybody outside the system can have any hope of understanding how it all works.
March 2025:
A motion was filed by Councillor Dudas to look at harmonizing the speed limits along Jeanne d’Arc to rectify the confusion drivers feel about going 60 > 40 > 60 > 40 > 50 > 40 > 60 over a 5 km stretch of the road, past multiple schools, partly on roads that are built like highways, with wide lanes running straight through communities.
Jan/Feb 2025:
Within the first several weeks of 2025, we heard through the grapevine that the study and designs were complete and should be able to proceed relatively quickly from that point.
Still Fall 2024:
In what I still view as a great move, the city decided to take some extra time for this study and extend the scope of the study area to include Jeanne d’Arc Blvd North as well, which covers the two main arterials in the community. This was expected to delay the completion of the study a few months, into the start of 2025.
Fall 2024:
We first heard at this time that a traffic and design study for a portion of Orléans Blvd was being worked on and close to final.
Spring 2024:
Next, last spring a roundabout was proposed as a bus turnaround where Jeanne d’Arc meets Fortune and Vineyard, which is actually great but faced a lot of chagrin from local residents as it was fast-tracked without the benefits of it really being explained. It’s not perfect, but that really comes down to Ontario traffic rules about pedestrian crossings. As with most roundabouts, they face heavy criticism during consultations, and then once they’re working, complaints disappear and people are generally happy with less waiting at lights. Fortunately in this case (even though it feels like residents weren’t heard), the city did what it needed to do for the bus system and made the roundabout despite the vitriol from residents.
Side note: it’s actually pretty silly to me to think of a 4-lane road with a 60-kph speed limit being viewed as safer compared to a modern, chicaned, 1-lane roundabout with pedestrian refuge islands.
The last part of the story of these stretches of road is unfortunately still playing out.
2023:
First, somewhere between spring and fall 2023, we ‘lost’ cycling lanes and safer infrastructure on Orléans Blvd across Highway 174, after the city’s plans were deemed to create conflicts between transit and cycling facilities. That bridge now has transit stations built but no safe passage for cyclists, though we’re still being told that a(nother?) rebuild is still part of the eventual plan.
Leave a Reply