Get ready to pedal and play! On Saturday, September 27, 2025, the streets of Convent Glen North will be filled with smiling families, colorful bikes, and a collective call for safer neighbourhoods to live and play in. The Kidical Mass bike ride is back in Ottawa for the final time this season, acting as the joyful capstone to the Convent Glen Orléans Wood Community Association’s (CGOW) weekly ‘Pedal and Play’ rides that have run since the end of April.
This free, family-friendly event is a vibrant celebration that starts at 9:30 AM at Father Richard Ward Park (behind des Voyageurs school). Before the ride departs at 10:00 AM, kids are encouraged to decorate their bikes and enjoy activities like drawing with chalk and playing with bubbles. At 10, we’ll start the ride itself, which is a slow-paced, social 3-kilometre loop through the neighbourhood.
However, the event is about more than just a bike ride; it’s a powerful, positive demonstration of what a safer, more connected community can look like.
The Advocacy Route: Highlighting the Need for Change
Kidical Mass is an international movement focused on children and families, advocating for streets to be safe for kids to travel to places like schools, parks, and community centres.
The 3-kilometre route through Convent Glen North deliberately highlights places along the route where simple, proactive road design changes could make the entire community safer and more accessible for everyone—whether you’re on a bike, on foot, or in another kind of mobility device. This is the core of the Vision Zero strategy.
The City of Ottawa could formally make a Vision Zero pledge, where we aspire to no deaths caused in whole or in part by the design of our roads. If you’ve been paying attention, it has been a particularly bad summer for road violence in the city. The most recent (out-of-date) Ottawa Road Safety Action Plan aims to reduce deaths in the short term and eventually eliminate them, but lacks a firm plan to accomplish that.
Here are some of the concepts the ride will highlight along the way:
- Protecting Intersections: At major arterial intersections, we will be navigating several roads and crossings where car travel speed has historically been the only priority, even right in front of schools. Advocacy calls for design changes for these residential intersections to slow and calm traffic, and to prioritize the safety of road users outside of cars above car travel times. Even minor intersections on Orléans and Jeanne d’Arc Blvds are very wide and hard to cross on foot or on bike, but these can be made safer.
- Safe (Raised) Crossings: In several places along our ride Saturday, the route would benefit in several ways from having raised crosswalks across roadways, either to connect paths to schools or to tie the park network together. The most obvious places for a design feature like this would be:
- Voyageur Drive in front of des Voyageurs school,
- Orléans Blvd in front of Cairine Wilson school,
- Jeanne d’Arc Blvd connecting the two paths next to Fire Station 52.
- Creating Safe Corridors: Along stretches of road like Jeanne d’Arc and Orléans Blvds, the ride showcases the need for separated and wide bike lanes that physically protect cyclists of all ages and abilities. This infrastructure should connect families directly to key destinations like nearby schools, shopping centres, parks, and the Heart of Orléans. People in Orléans love cycling for leisure, if we make it safe to get to neighbourhood destinations on bike, more and more people will use these facilities. Connecting the path network more logically to these road facilities will also make them easier to use for everybody.
- Slowing Down: The entire route emphasizes the importance of traffic calming features and reduced speed limits on residential and local arterial streets. The goal is to design streets so that even when human mistakes happen, they don’t cause life-changing or -ending impacts.
- Path Lighting and Winter Maintenance: This topic won’t be relevant during our fall daytime ride, but it’s worth mentioning as the snow comes and it gets dark early. The paths we’ll be following aren’t lit at night, and most of them need a solid upgrade to support maintenance in the winter. These upgrades will make it WAY easier to get around without a car for more trips in the winter (you can’t use transportation infrastructure, roads included, if they’re not cleared of snow). This will be especially nice when the LRT opens and we’ll have a direct route downtown.
- Oh yeah, and there’s a speed camera on the route too!: I’d rather we could focus solely on our advocacy goals from before Thursday’s announcement about Ontario removing speed cameras, but it’s worth mentioning this really does reduce speeding on Jeanne d’Arc in a meaningful way. I’d prefer a road diet to calm and slow traffic compared to a wide road with a camera, but until that happens, that camera was helping.
An Invitation to Everyone
You don’t have to be a cyclist to be involved in this event. This is a chance for the entire community to come together to demonstrate their interest and document a positive vision for modernizing Orleans.
The organizers—The New Orleans, the Convent Glen Orléans Wood Community Association, and Bike Ottawa—want to be clear: everyone is welcome to attend, even if you do not plan to ride. People who are not necessarily interested in cycling are still welcome to come and discuss making our streets safer for all of us. This movement is also about tackling the climate emergency and creating a more financially resilient and socially connected community. We’d also like to give a special shoutout to For Our Kids – Ottawa Gatineau and Schools Streets Ottawa, two great non-profit organizations in Ottawa that share our goal of making our streets safer for children.
Join us to advocate for a more accessible and forward-thinking Orleans.
Event Details:
- What: Kidical Mass Bike Ride
- When: Saturday, September 27, 2025 (9:30 AM activities start, 10:00 AM ride starts)
- Where: Father Richard Ward Park, Convent Glen North
- Cost: FREE!
Find details, RSVP, and volunteer info here: cgow.ca/kidicalmass2025
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