In my last piece, we talked about Cassie Smith’s 2024 master’s research. She took a very close look at what it would take for the City of Ottawa to move away from our transportation network being dominated by roads for cars to go fast. This is a feeling every non-driver in Ottawa intuitively has all the time: our roads are built in an “Oops, All Cars!” style. But to understand why this keeps happening, we have to look past political speeches and look at how the city actually plans and spends its budgets.
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In her thesis (specifically on pages 64 and 65), Smith talks about one of the biggest roadblocks to change. She compares “innovation” (building new, more sustainable transportation infrastructure like bike lanes) with “exnovation” (moving away from mature but harmful or outdated practices like building fast, wide roads and highways through urban spaces). City budgets in Ottawa are set up to automatically spend money on roads first, especially old roads that are due for maintenance. In other words, our money is locked in to protect car lanes before we can really spend any money on anything else.
This is a rule forced on us by the province of Ontario, so even if Ottawa’s City Council wants do prioritize differently, they cannot. Under a law called Ontario Regulation 588/17, cities must make “Asset Management Plans.” This is just a fancy way of saying they must keep older, basic infrastructure like roads in a “state of good repair”. They have to maintain what we already have first.
What counts as basic infrastructure under this law? The province says it means roads, bridges, and water pipes. Ottawa has grown outward for seventy years while only really providing transportation infrastructure for cars (and public transit). We now have a massive amount of asphalt that falls into that category. Under provincial law, keeping those roads in working order is not optional. We must do it, even if we can’t really afford to.
We can see exactly how this works in Ottawa’s 2026 Budget. The city approved a massive $239.6 million for roads, water, and sewer work. That includes $70 million just to repave existing roads, and it doesn’t even start to cover the existing backlog.
By contrast, the city is spending only $13.5 million to fix sidewalks and paths.
This is where the maintenance rules make it clear why everything is in disrepair. The city is legally required to keep its assets in good shape, but roads suck all the air out of the room, so to speak. By the time we’ve spent all this money on road repairs and maintenance (our most expensive infrastructure), there’s simply almost nothing left for any other maintenance priorities. And the City of Ottawa’s allergy to raising property taxes to pay for this means we’re perennially begging for scraps to even fix anything else, much less put in new active transportation infrastructure.
By making road upkeep a must-do and having just so much roadway to cover, we get stuck in an endless loop of more and more road maintenance at the expense of other investments. But what happens when we try to build something new? As we will see in the next part of this series, new sustainable transportation projects (like public transit and cycling infrastructure) have to fight for a completely different—and much less reliable—pot of money.
All too true. All of it.