The following is a letter sent by Bike Ottawa and School Streets Ottawa regarding the road safety education campaign recently released by the City of Ottawa. Our concern is the approach to road safety that messaging of this type represents. We call on the City to redirect resources toward proven methods of making our streets […]
The Percy Street / 417 underpass as an exclusive active-transportation route
A small section of Percy Street has been fully closed to cars for its Highway 417 bridge replacement (detailed design here) for over a month. The prolonged underpass closure and subsequent terrible cycling detour routes have led me to do some thinking about this simple but important piece of infrastructure.
2.5-minute Campaign
This summer, Mayor Sutcliffe recorded a video of himself on the portion of the Queen Elizabeth Driveway devoted to the National Capital Commission’s Active Use Program. The video ran for 2.5 minutes, and the mayor used the absence of people using the road during that time as a call to end the program. (For a […]
Education is no substitute for bike infrastructure
On July 11, the Ottawa Citizen published an op-ed by Monna-leigh McElveny, a CANBIKE 4 instructor with the Kanata Nepean Bike Club, Safety and Education, following a collision between a cyclist and truck in Centretown West. In the op-ed, McElveny argued for an education-based approach to keeping people biking safe (McElveny wrote a strikingly similar […]