What Drives Me Nuts…

April 5, 2023

A hoax perpetrated by the media but originated by City Hall Councilors in Ottawa drives me nuts. It is that Ottawa is a city for cycling; for commuting to work on bikes. This idea is insane considering the climate in Ottawa. Half of the year one cannot comfortably and safely commute to work on a bike: it is too cold for cycling, down to minus 20 centigrade, and with the snow and ice on the roadbed, it is extremely hazardous.

This is the end of March, and we still have plenty of snow piled up on two sides of our local streets, making it nearly impossible to cycle on the snow-narrowed roadway. Plus, the car traffic makes it dangerous, especially when you hit a patch of ice cycling on the road.

But it is not only during the winter months that bicycling is treacherous, during the shoulder seasons, the weather is cold, and you need gloves and layers of clothing to keep your core warm. Some people wear a mask. I have done it and I did not find it pleasant to ride during the early spring and late fall.

OK. Let’s talk about the summer months; you would think that it is a pleasure to cycle between May and September. And it can be. If you take a ride along the parkways or the Rideau Canal, when these roads are reserved for cyclists on the weekends, then it is a pleasure to ride in peace without cars.

But consider going to work on a bike during the hot summer months that I had done. In my case, I worked up a sweat and had to shower and change upon arrival at work. So, I needed a change of clothing that I could take with me or store at a locker when available, and I needed a place to change. Some of the larger employers provide change rooms. Smaller employers do not have the space for such facilities, making it very difficult to commute to work and feel and look decent during work.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that office workers are more likely to cycle to work than others.

But think about it: you need much more time to commute by bike instead of driving your car to work because of the additional time you need for showering and changing, as well as the slower speed of a bicycle compared to a car. If you have a family with children and are needed at home after work, time is precious, and the obvious commute is by car to get home early and help with family activities.

Our city is trying to make Ottawa a cycling city. The city planners push the idea and in fact, one mayoral candidate at the last election ran on a platform to make the city a haven for cyclists by spending millions of dollars building bicycle paths. She lost, but the official plan recently approved for Ottawa heavily emphasizes cycling to get around in the city.

They brought up Amsterdam as a model for cycling; it is a city with a moderate year-round climate. As well, it occupies a much smaller area, with a denser population than Ottawa, making cycling distances small. In Ottawa, the inner suburbs range up to ten kilometers, while the suburbs are ten to twenty kilometers from downtown.  

I searched for some metrics on cycling in Ottawa and found that perhaps two percent of the people commute to work by bike, while over seventy percent use their cars and seventeen percent use public transit. The rest walk to work or work at home. These numbers do not provide a ringing endorsement for cycling.

The adult population cycles for exercise and recreation, mostly. I have not seen many people shopping on a bike. We have students cycling to schools and then, of course, the hardcore, who cycle to work. If the purpose of the city planners is to wean away people from using their gas-powered cars to save the environment, then I would suggest that the priority should be on increasing public transit use.

And the city attempts to do that by reducing the requirement to provide car parking in multifamily residential buildings while increasing the requirement for bicycle parking. This is a no-cost solution for the city, but it does nothing for making public transit more attractive to the public.

Public transit would become more attractive to the public through reduced fees, more routes, and more frequent bus service. And that is not happening, so people will keep on using their cars that will adorn our local streets, lacking garage space in residential buildings.

As an example of what is happening, the city approved recently a sixteen-unit, four-storey apartment complex on a single-family residential corner lot, with no parking. The footprint for the building occupies the entire lot. The justification for the approval was that the building is on a “planned” major transportation route with good public transit. But there is no timeline for making this road a major transportation route, and there is no budget as yet for its construction. Would it not have been more responsible to delay the approval until after the “major transportation” route is completed?

Another factor bearing on cycling is the recently increased popularity of working from home, which reduces the need to commute to work. The pandemic encouraged this trend and, now up to twenty percent of the working population enjoys working at home in Ottawa.

This work-at-home trend reduced the demand for public transit; the volume of the local public transit system is still only at seventy percent of pre-pandemic levels. Accompanying this trend is a growing budgetary deficit for the system that the upper levels of government have not helped financially. Is there a message there? We keep talking about the value of public transit but provide no funding to improve it!

And home workers like larger homes with an office, which are more available in the less dense outer suburbs. And with larger distances to get around to schools, and shops, cycling becomes less attractive.

I think the city’s promotion of cycling is a hoax but presented as virtuous behavior by twinning it with saving the environment.

Being bombarded with messages that cycling is key for the future of the city of Ottawa is an outright hoax that just drives me nuts. It makes no sense to me; it is a surreal wish. Does it make sense to you?