A candidate for the upcoming mayoral election in our city, Mark Sutcliffe,
recently released the following video:
“Some people view transportation through an ideological lens. They want you to walk or
ride a bike, no matter where you live, no matter where you're going, no matter what month of the
year. That might be easy if you live downtown and can get around on a bicycle, but there's so
much more to Ottawa than just downtown. I respect the fact that if you live in the suburbs or rural
Ottawa, you're not going to take your kid to ringette practice in February on a bike. My
transportation strategy doesn’t declare a ‘war on cars’. We need a system that works for everyone,
whether you’re walking, riding a bike, or driving a vehicle. I’ll bring a balanced approach.”
We actually didn’t have any plans to comment on Ottawa’s election but this is just too
frustrating to ignore. It’s an understanding of transportation that we’d expect from an
anonymous comment on YouTube or even Facebook, not a serious candidate for mayor. The idea of
a “war on cars” or everyone being forced to walk or bike everywhere is absurd. If there’s a “war”,
it’s a war on everyone else by the cars. Other modes are fighting for basic service
and infrastructure in a city overwhelmingly built to favour cars. People who follow our
channel will know that we like to showcase cycling successes in North America, and Ottawa definitely
has some that deserve recognition, including protected bike lanes, protected intersections,
and multi-use pathways, but let’s be real: these are the exception, not the rule.
Ottawa does not even come close to providing the same amount of access or infrastructure
to bikes as it does to cars. There’s a reason it has the nickname “Auto-wa”.
And sure, as a candidate you can say you’ll give us “a system that works for everyone”, but if
you want us to take that seriously, you need to understand what the current deficiencies are.
Virtually every single road accommodates cars, usually with multiple lanes in
each direction. In contrast, most roads don’t have any space for bikes at all,
and where bike lanes do exist they’re often nothing but a painted line. This is fine on slow,
quiet streets but if traffic picks up you simply need separation and protection.
Studies from Ottawa and elsewhere show that people overwhelmingly prefer separated or protected
infrastructure and often just won’t bike without it. Because of Ottawa’s piecemeal network, getting
around by bike can be complicated and dangerous. You have to plan your route carefully and even
be careful about where you live. It’s not like driving where you know every road is made for you.
Even in the more bike-friendly central city, important corridors like Gladstone lack any bike
infrastructure at all, Carling is a hellscape, and good examples of bike infrastructure like
Laurier and Main Street don’t even last for two kilometres. Things are getting better — the Bank
Street Bridge upgrade currently underway is very welcome — but even in (quote-unquote) “downtown”,
bikes don’t get anywhere near the same level of service provided to cars.
Of course, he’s not talking about the central city, he’s talking about the suburbs,
where he suggests bikes just aren’t practical. We completely understand the revulsion people
have to the thought of biking here, but these are all choices of infrastructure, design, and
traffic rules. Wide roads, fast traffic, spaced out intersections, long signal cycles, spread-out
housing, enormous parking lots, and little mixing of stores and homes — all of this is built on the
assumption that you will drive everywhere and you will like it, gosh-darn-it. Everything else
is an afterthought. But building the suburbs like this was a choice. It didn’t have to be
this way. Maybe if we changed this environment, people wouldn’t be forced to drive quite as much?
Some urbanists take the position that North American suburbs are too far gone,
too deeply car-dependent to be retrofitted for better walking, cycling, and transit. We don’t
agree with this, for the most part, but it’s a position you can take. But let’s be honest about
what this would mean, if it were true. It would mean that cars waged a war against all other modes
of transport — and they won. It would mean that transportation balance is not achievable in our
city, or at least the suburban parts of it. To flip this around and act like walking and
cycling are the real threats to balance, freedom, and choice in transportation is mind-boggling.
His video raising concern about a “war on cars” came in response to his main rival for mayor,
Catherine McKenney, proposing a $250 million investment in cycling infrastructure over four
years. He sees this as “pitting cyclists against motorists” and focusing too much on one method
of transportation. But cycling infrastructure is so far behind that big investments are what
we need if we want to bring it up to par. His video is fear-mongering and pitting
people against cyclists by suggesting that basic infrastructure and service
for cyclists amounts to a “war on cars” and by bringing up the idea of everyone being forced
to walk or bike everywhere as if that’s remotely possible in any of our lifetimes.
What explains this mentality that cars are under siege, the underdog, threatened with extinction,
even in car-centric cities? Why does the possibility of bike lanes cause people to
make the big leap to thinking “maybe our city will eliminate private automobiles”?
One part has to be that a lot of people just don’t have much experience with urban cycling, outside
of recreational pathways, and they genuinely don’t have a very good idea of the state of
the bike network. They look around, see some bike lanes, and think “well, our city has bike lanes”.
They don’t think through what it’s actually like to bike on them or whether they go anywhere useful
because that’s just not part of their life. They aren’t aware of the major deficiencies or they
haven’t considered what a truly balanced and bike-friendly city might look like.
Geometry has to play a role in this perception of a “war on cars” too. If you experience traffic
delays or trouble finding parking, it’s easy to assume that the problem is the city failing to
provide you with enough space. But what if the real problem is that cars are very space-hungry
and hard to accommodate? O’Connor Street in downtown Ottawa provides service to bikes in
both directions with the space of one single car lane. Is this a “war on cars” or bikes getting
more than their “fair share”? Objectively, no. Cars still get the other three lanes,
and the city chose a design that was less safe for cyclists (and more confusing for drivers) in
order to preserve traffic flow and parking, “more in line with other North American examples”. But
it does still take away some space from cars and that’s enough for lots of people to think
it went too far or wonder why cyclists can’t use the canal instead: going around the edge of the
neighbourhood instead of going through it, a much lower standard of service than cars get.
In this video we’ve focused on cycling but many of the same points can apply to walking.
Ottawa’s pedestrian infrastructure is more consistent at least but gaps still remain.
On one walk near the Trainyards Mall, the sidewalk on the suburban arterial disappeared
multiple times. Imagine being in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller and having your sidewalk just
turn into grass and rocks. Time to backtrack through the last intersection, walking almost
half a kilometre to get to the same place on the other side. Hopefully it won’t happen there too.
Mark Sutcliffe’s video actually seems to be filmed on a residential street without sidewalks,
which is pretty common in Ottawa once you get even a bit outside of the central city. Of course,
the pedestrian experience goes beyond sidewalks — you can’t watch a parent huddling their children
in a suburban traffic island making sure they don’t get hit by cars in the slip lane and
somehow think that cars are the underdog in Ottawa. And let’s not forget public transit!
His claim that “some people” want you to walk or bike everywhere is even worse than it seems when
you first hear it. Not only do advocates for more walkable and bike-friendly cities basically always
accept that there is still a place for cars in our cities, albeit a reduced one from the car-centric
status quo, they also enthusiastically support robust public transit too.
Mark Sutcliffe, on the off chance that you’re watching this, you clearly care a lot about
fiscal responsibility and we get it, but please don’t forget household finances. Transportation
is currently the second biggest expense for households, and most of that is buying,
maintaining, insuring, and fueling cars. When we moved to Ottawa we carefully chose
where to live based on walkable amenities, bike infrastructure, and transit access,
and as a result we’re able to live car-free. The few times a year we need a car, we rent one. This
is an enormous burden off our shoulders and if we lived in a place that forced us to own one or even
two cars just to get groceries and go to work, we’d be in a bad place financially. But again,
we had to carefully plan this around the city’s infrastructure. With better infrastructure, this
option can be available to more people. Of course, not everyone can go car-free or even wants to.
It’s also important to allow two-car households the option to become one-car households or even
just not have to drive their two cars as often. We also need to give children and
teenagers independence to walk or bike places safely, instead of relying on their parents to
shuttle them around everywhere. The point isn’t that no one would ever need a car for anything,
but rather that cars shouldn’t be a basic requirement by default. But maybe you don’t
see the benefit here or you don’t think it’s worth the initial investment. OK, just please understand
that the status quo in Ottawa isn’t remotely “balanced”, “neutral”, or “non-ideological”. It’s
deeply tilted in favour of cars in a way that has real costs on family budgets, community health and
safety, children’s independence, the environment, and the city’s future infrastructure liabilities.
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