Orléans is often described as a bedroom community, but in my opinion, that phrasing is far too gentle. For those of us living north of the 174 highway, the reality is more akin to a corn maze. We are living on a suburban island, physically and legally hemmed in by the Greenbelt to the West, the Ottawa River to the North, and Highway 174 to the South and East. While this walled garden aesthetic does have some appeal for people looking for a quieter lifestyle, the geometry of this layout leads to a community that is functionally trapped and financially underwater. We’ve engineered this neighbourhood so most trips most people take require you to leave, and yet we’re reliant on just a handful of roads to escape.
We are quick to blame construction or road maintenance for delays in getting across or onto the highway, but when you are reliant on just a handful of connections to the outside world, the loss of one of them, even temporarily, is felt immediately and harshly when any amount of car traffic tries to use it.
The Geometry of our Island
From a transportation perspective, a connected neighborhood can be defined at least in part by its permeability—the ability for people to move in and out via different connections to the rest of the city. In our corner of Orléans north of the highway, the permeability factor is just incredibly low. It’s not an exaggeration to say that most people currently leave or enter this community by car. Yet we have just four ways in or out of the community that spans over five square kilometres: four specific roads that serve as the only passages for thousands of residents. The Ottawa River Pathway borders the north edge as well to let active transportation users through east or west, but any accessible destinations along that path are several kilometres further down the pathway.
The problem isn’t just that there are only four ways in or out to get anywhere; it’s that each of those outlets was designed primarily for a single purpose: to funnel cars across or onto a high-speed highway as quickly and efficiently as possible. This kind of car-centric design from when the 174 was built is a structural filter to transportation for residents of this part of Orléans. When you design the exits from a community to be inadvertently harrowing (or even deadly) for anyone not surrounded by several thousand pounds of steel—like the 174 overpasses in Orléans—you are enforcing car dependency by threat of injury.
The Other Transportation Options
Transit
The current status of public transportation north of the 174 is basically that we’re stuck in a holding pattern. We’re potentially months away from the opening of an LRT extension that brings the whole community within 2 km (max 20-25 minute walk) of a train station, which will be a game changer.
The bus system we have now in Orléans runs infrequent buses that criss-cross various communities but are very hard to rely on for spontaneous trips to an arbitrary destination in Orléans. For most trips that start and end in the east end, there are a fair number of routes that run regularly. However, the issue with each of these buses only coming every 30 minutes is that there is very little forgiveness or flexibility. If you’re a little bit late or don’t plan it perfectly, there’s no way to just ‘catch the next one’ without waiting up to half an hour.
Once the LRT extension launches, my hope is that the bus map will be redrawn for main routes, focusing on funneling people to the train and to key destinations from the train like down St Joseph, Orléans Blvd, Tenth Line, Trim, and Innes. Our disjointed and whimsically curvy neighbourhood street layouts definitely don’t make transit planning an easy task, but I think a focus on frequent service and reliability will help a lot.
Walking
Most of the community north of the 174 is a fairly nice, calm place to walk, and if you’re lucky, you can actually find places to live here where you really can easily walk for most regular errands. Jeff Leiper just put out a video about his experience doing just that growing up in this neighbourhood near the Convent Glen Shopping Centre. It can be pretty loud walking along Jeanne d’Arc or Orleans Blvd (the new 40 kph speed limit on Jeanne d’Arc, if respected, helps), but there are lots of paths, and most sidewalks (if you get one at all) are buffeted from the road by strips of grass.
The main issue with walking as a mode of transportation is that everything in the community is so darn far apart. So in the context of leaving the neighbourhood on foot, it’s just a relatively long walk even if you’re fairly close to the highway. At least some places you’d want to comfortably walk to should realistically be 500 m to 1 km away, and accessible via roads or paths that are maintained in the winter, which can be a real uphill battle here.
Bike
Cycling is in some ways the ideal way to get around this part of Orléans. On wheels, it doesn’t take too long to get from one end to the other. We have been right on the precipice of having our two main routes through the community (Jeanne d’Arc and Orléans Blvds) retrofitted with separated cycling infrastructure.
Riding a bike in this part of the city can be frustrating in part because it’s SO CLOSE to being a great experience all the time. Fixing the rough edges would be very simple, if not for our collective inability to see past the perception of cars being the only valid form of transportation.
Because of that perception, only one of the four gateways in and out of this community (Jeanne d’Arc) has any affordance for safe cycling. And at that, while the brand new cycling connection is so much better than it used to be, it is still very much designed to stay out of the way of car traffic as much as possible. The cycling facilities also start and end just a few hundred metres past the 174 overpass in either direction, and don’t formally connect to anything but the Bob Macquarrie Rec Complex parking lot.
Really, the only other thing making biking everywhere less feasible is what we’ll get to next, which is that there are just not many local destinations within our neighbourhood borders, and the ones we do have are not evenly distributed.
The Lack of Neighbourhood Shops
The physical isolation I described is compounded by a legal framework that makes any sort of commercial use of residential space unlawful. Under our current suburban zoning, businesses cannot be opened or operated on residential streets. Something as simple and innocuous as a quiet corner cafe or a neighborhood grocery store can’t happen anywhere that wasn’t set in stone back in the 80s.
Even the handful of relatively small commercial parcels (surrounded by equally large or even larger parking lots) aren’t spread out across the community equally. Some people might be able to consider walking to the local pizza shop or the Metro, but many people who live even one street over just end up driving because that’s how the neighbourhood is built.
When we make a trip to daily or weekly errands hard or impossible in the places where people live, we force every household to participate in an absurd amount of logistics for the simplest tasks. We turn a simple need—picking up a loaf of fresh bread or carton of milk—into a 15-20-minute mission that requires a car. This doesn’t just waste our time; it drains our local economy. Every dollar spent at a big-box store or multi-national franchise in a strip mall located on the other side of Orléans is a dollar that is less likely to go to a local business owner or employee.
More importantly, this lack of local commerce (and the housing density that usually accompanies it) creates a massive revenue gap. We are paying to maintain the roads, pipes, and wires of a very large residential footprint while generating almost no commercial tax revenue to offset those costs. Traditional mixed-use blocks are many times more efficient at paying the city’s bills compared to streets with only single-family homes. By committing ourselves to a car-only residential transportation system, we are effectively subsidizing our own neighborhood’s insolvency.
The Life of a Chauffeur
For parents, a community designed this way creates a visceral, daily friction to our lives. We have been demoted from mentors and guides to unpaid taxi drivers. Because the physical design of the community necessitates a car for nearly all tasks, our children are isolated, and their independent mobility is suppressed for much longer than would otherwise feel necessary.
A neighbourhood built to make it easier to move around or come and go outside of a car is one where people who cannot or drive everywhere can actually exist without requiring a personal driver.
The Vacation Paradox
We see the Vacation Paradox play out every year: we and our neighbours spend thousands of dollars to fly to European capitals or Caribbean resorts just to experience the simple joy of a street that isn’t full of cars and designed like a highway. Our spending habits when we want to relax reveal a deep, suppressed preference for the very lifestyle that our local infrastructure actively prevents.
The Path to Liberation
If we want to break this habit, we have to stop treating our neighborhood like a bunch of scattered tiny acreages and start treating it like a village. This requires two simple but radical shifts to create a real small town:
- Allow Mixed Use: We should adopt universal mixed-use permissions across residential neighbourhoods in the city. If it’s legal to live there, it should be legal to start and run a business there.
- Diversify our Housing Options: Single-family housing is draining the city’s finances. Not everyone wants to live in a house with a big garage, driveway, yard, pool, patio, etc. We’ve privatized these spaces that are much cheaper to build for the public good, and we’re unwilling to pay the real cost for these private amenities. This ignorance about how much suburban infrastructure costs is bankrupting our city.
We are no longer just arguing about the desirability of a bike lane or a coffee shop; we are talking about the financial and social viability of Orléans itself. It’s time to stop paying ever larger bills for a walled garden that keeps us trapped, and start building a community that actually lets us live.
You are not wrong about any of this.
Let’s see if that view resonates. Every time I write a post ideas for 2 more pop into my head.