Moffatt: Zombies, fairies and dragons in Ottawa’s new transportation plan

Heavy traffic on Carling Avenue will only grow worse as more housing springs up on a roadway that will never have LRT. Photo by Ashley Fraser /PostmediaArticle content

Long-range transportation planning always involves some element of fantasy. The future is impossible to predict: Who would have anticipated the upheaval in transportation patterns we’ve seen since 2020? But even with that caveat, Ottawa’s draft new Transportation Master Plan (TMP), released April 1, is an unusually fantastical document.

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And much like other classics in the fantasy genre, the new TMP is filled with zombies, fairies, and dragons.

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Let’s start with the zombies. These are transportation plans that aren’t quite alive, but never seem to die. Take the Alta Vista Transportation Corridor (AVTC), a proposed four-lane arterial extending Conroy Road north to Highway 417 at Nicholas Street. It’s been in the city’s planning books since the 1950s, but has never been built (save for a small Hospital Link stub). In the new TMP, the AVTC lives again — though Coun. Shawn Menard took a proverbial machete and chopped off one of its arms (the north section through the so-called “People’s Park,” a bare field on Lees Avenue).

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Even in this compromised form, the zombie trudges on, hungry for brains — or, in this case, hungry to pave over the Kilborn Allotment Gardens. Will this undead foe never be vanquished?

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Next, the fairies: transportation projects with magical powers despite their possible non-existence. The 2013 TMP called these part of the “Ultimate Network”; the 2025 edition places them in the “Needs-Based” network. In plain English, they are projects without any funding or timeline attached to them.

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Development without transit

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Yet even though these might not be real, they still carry real power. For years, the city has been approving highrises on Carling Avenue under the pretence that their residents would be one day served by an LRT line. This was obviously never built and the new TMP has replaced it with bus rapid transit (BRT), expected construction … to be determined. All that’s actually planned for Carling by 2046 are regular bus lanes of the non-rapid variety. It’s transit-oriented development without the transit: magic! Time will tell if the Stage 3 LRT to Kanata-Stittsville and Barrhaven is a fairy or the real thing.

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Finally, the most terrifying mythical creatures lurking in the shadows of the TMP: the dragons of cost and congestion.

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Ottawa is set to grow from one to 1.4 million people in the next 25 years. We can handle that many people, but we sure can’t fit that many new cars on the roads. That’s why Ottawa’s Official Plan set the target of shifting the majority of trips to walking, cycling, transit and carpooling by 2046. The new TMP throws cold water on that idea — calling it “difficult to achieve.” And what’s the point of trying something difficult? Instead, the TMP keeps the majority of travel to be done by drivers, which will add an anticipated 542,000 car trips per day to Ottawa’s roads. More cars mean more traffic and slower commutes.