I will have lived in Ottawa going on 20 years this summer. In that time, I’ve learned about a feeling (I don’t share) that I’ve come to understand is key to the experience of living in Ottawa suburbs. A lot of people living in this city firmly believe they should be able to traverse the whole city (from Orleans to Kanata) in 30 minutes or less. If you can do it at 10 PM with no construction, to a lot of folks it feels like it should always be possible with enough willpower and infrastructure. But even if you love to drive everywhere, there’s a big, annoying reason why that commuter’s dream often ends up a congestion-snarled nightmare.
I’ve got some bad news, this isn’t because of bad drivers or endless construction. It’s actually much simpler: We just plain don’t all fit on the road. And we never will.
What Do You Mean, We Don’t All Fit?
Think about your car for a second. On your commute, it’s basically a two-ton metal suit you wear to get around. Compared to your body. it’s enormous! You’re just one person! Statistically, at least 70% of cars during rush hour hold a single person, in my experience that number is more like 80-90%. During this drive, you’re taking up about as much physical space as 10 people walking or sitting on the bus or train.
But it actually gets even worse. Picture your metal suit moving at 100 km/h. To prevent catastrophic crashes, cars need to be spaced out, ideally by a very significant margin. You need a big “safety bubble” of empty road in front of you, especially at those speeds. The slower you go, the less buffer space you need in front of your car.
In fact, this goes even further, because as traffic slows down, more cars can all fit on the same road space at the same time. This means that traffic necessarily has to slow down when more people are on the road, specifically because roads can handle more cars when they’re all moving at lower speeds.
When you add up all the cars and space between them for everyone in Orleans trying to get to work by 8:00 AM, you quickly run into a space problem. To give all those commuters enough room to drive at highways speeds into the core at the same time, the highway might have to be as wide as a football field. And once you got downtown, there simply isn’t room to park all these cars alongside the much more important office buildings, apartments and condos, or shops.
There is a LOT of car parking downtown, and it’s very expensive there because space comes at a premium. Widening the highway would only help if there were more places in the core for those cars to spend the work day, which there aren’t now and there never will be.
This logic applies the most during rush hour, but it applies all day, and year-round. If every Ottawa resident feels its an implicit right and their prerogative to drive across the city at all times, it follows that congestion can pop up at any time a lot of people make this choice.
The Greenbelt Bottleneck
Ottawa has another quirk that only makes this problem worse: the Greenbelt. The suburbs outside the Greenbelt are like a set of giant soda bottles, and the only way into the glass (the downtown core) is through the skinny neck.
Leaving the east end and heading downtown, we only have a few main roads to get west, namely the 174 and Innes Road. You might think, “Okay, let’s just make the neck of the bottle bigger. Add more lanes!” But here’s something interesting about human behaviour: whenever we make something easier, more people decide to do it. This is called ‘induced demand’.
It seems counter-intuitive, but it’s shown to be true over and over again. If you build more car lanes, you make it easier to drive, and so more people will drive and eventually you’re stuck with 3 congested lanes instead of 2. These drivers don’t come out of nowhere, they’re people who are frustrated by transit, or decide it’s a good idea to get a new job across town. You get more of what you build for.
For a moment, let’s think about your nearly full closet, bursting at the seams, making it hard to even think about buying new clothes. If you did a renovation and doubled your closet space, probably one of the first things you’d do is spend some time shopping, picking up those new outfits you’d been eyeing but just didn’t have space for. Give it a couple of years, and you’re likely to be dealing with a closet that’s just as full again, only now it’s taking up twice the space.
Similarly, back on our roads, before you know it, the new lanes are just as clogged as the old ones. We’ve tried to build our way out of traffic for well over 50 years, and it’s never worked. Because, again: we just don’t fit.
If we induced demand for cycling with bike lanes, or transit by expanding service and increasing frequency, usage of those modes of transportation would increase as well. This would be a healthy upgrade for any city that chooses that path.
Ottawa is a Bunch of Cities in a Trenchcoat
Orleans was built as a bedroom community. From the beginning, the plan for basically every suburb in the city was: live here, sleep here, maybe go to school, but for anything else, you need to leave. There are very few jobs in the community, and it’s statistically unlikely you live near any shops or businesses. This way of planning a city forces you to spend hours of your life every day or every week sitting in a car, paying for gas, and stressing out.
But what if the goal wasn’t to get places faster? What if the goal was to spend less time travelling?
Think about your regular errands and the things you love to do. Imagine going to the grocery store 2 streets over, or picking up that prescription at the end of the block. What if your favourite restaurant was around the corner or there was an art studio you could walk to for pottery classes. You don’t need to care what the speed limit is on the way there, because you’re only minutes away from where you need to go! That’s the secret.
Let’s Make Orleans the Destination
The way to take control of how we spend our time living in the suburbs has nothing to do with a faster highway or more lanes. We need to think more about how to bring the places we want to work and play closer to home. Cities are fractals, and you can continue to think about having amenities ‘nearby’ in smaller and smaller chunks until everything you need regularly is available right where you live.
Imagine if your job was a five-minute bike ride away near Place d’Orléans instead of downtown. Imagine if St-Joseph was full of restaurant and cafe patios, and shops or plazas you actually wanted to hang out at. If we have everything we need in our own backyard, the highway loses its hold over us. It just doesn’t matter as much anymore.
The solution to traffic isn’t building more roads, because private cars don’t scale when everyone wants to travel all at once. We’ll never win that fight. Instead, we should start building a version of Orleans where you don’t have to leave the East End (or even your own neighbourhood) just to have a life.
After all, the best way to avoid an errand that includes a 30-minute drive going 20km across town is to rethink how we view our neighbourhoods. A 5- to 10-minute walk of less than 1 km to a nearby amenity gives you fresh air, exercise, and keeps you connected to your community. Getting your time back is just a bonus.
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