This is Ottawa’s only IKEA, located deep in the suburbs about 15 kilometres, 8 nautical miles,
or 9 regular miles from downtown. With its humongous parking lot and highwayside location,
you might expect that getting here by bike would be out of the question for anyone who values their
own health and safety. You might reasonably expect that the trip would involve taking your life into
your own hands on wide suburban arterial roads that are downright hostile to the existence of
any person who is not encased in two tons of metal and plastic. We’ve had those experiences
in Ottawa before, but this trip wasn’t that. For the most part. After hearing through the
grapevine that Ottawa has one of the most accessible IKEAs by bike in the country,
we decided to check it out ourselves. What we found was… much better than you’d expect.
Starting at City Hall, we head south on the Rideau Canal Pathway, the crown jewel of central Ottawa’s
active transportation network. Walking or biking here is one of the top tourist attractions in
the city but the route is functional too, linking some pretty populated neighbourhoods with downtown
and the city’s two big universities. On this trip we’re lucky enough to run
into the car-free portion of Queen Elizabeth Driveway, the road that runs along the canal.
We don’t know why this road is called a “driveway” (usually in North America this
is a driveway) but we’re not complaining. Critics ask why cyclists and pedestrians need the road
when there’s already a pathway for them but these downtown pathways can get very busy at peak times.
Shared pathways can be great infrastructure with low-to-moderate traffic but anything more and you
get conflicts between walkers, runners, cyclists, and Canada geese going at different speeds. Also,
the canal is basically a linear park. Having fast traffic cut right through the middle of a park
degrades the experience. There’s lots of green space here that isn’t really used when the road
is open to cars because people just don’t want to be that close to the noise and danger of traffic.
With cars gone, we notice more people hanging out, sitting on the grass,
having a picnic with friends. With cars zooming by, it’s just dead space.
With memories of being able to bike side-by-side and talk to each other fresh in our mind,
we find ourselves herded back onto the narrower canal pathway. All things considered it’s still a
pretty good experience, but when you’ve tasted the freedom of the open road, it’s hard to go back.
Moving on, we swing past Dow’s Lake, a little too close for comfort to oncoming traffic,
but we’re treated to a nice view of the lake as well as new housing under construction.
We’ve heard people complain about the heights here but this is all within a few hundred metres of an
O-Train station — build, baby, build. Past Dow’s Lake we have to leave the multi-use pathway to
cross an intersection that’s clearly not designed to handle the amount of bike traffic it receives.
Further on, we get to one of the few actually unpleasant parts of the route:
a painted bike lane with traffic going fast enough that one of us blatantly disrespected
the Canadian principles of peace, order, and good government by taking the sidewalk.
Next up, our trip takes us through the Central Experimental Farm. Truth be told,
we’ve lived in Ottawa for more than a year now and we still don’t know what to make of it.
It’s an actual farm not that far from downtown with cows and crops,
run by the government for research. It also functions like a park, albeit one with a unique
air freshener, with people walking, playing, and picnicking around some of the fields.
It’s a genuinely nice amenity to have but the contrast is a little out-of-this-world when you
see a tractor baling hay to the backdrop of the tallest building in the city. It’s a wonderful
place to bike though, and it takes us a few more kilometres to our destination using multi-use
pathways and country roads like Cow Lane where basically the only other traffic is tractors.
Leaving the Experimental Farm we continue on the Experimental Farm Pathway
that runs quite a bit further into Ottawa’s more suburban neighbourhoods.
Biking in Ottawa relies a lot on these pathways, which we talked about in another video.
Shared pathways or multi-use pathways have problems with crowding in higher
traffic areas and times but Ottawa would not be one-tenth as bike-friendly without this network,
mostly provided by the federal government separate from the city. We think these pathways are
underrated by cycling advocates, often commuters, who don’t like being slowed down by pedestrians.
That’s completely valid, but regular people who are less confident and experienced on a bike (the
majority of the population) tend to rank speed as a lower priority than separation from cars.
This is the kind of environment that makes regular people feel safe and comfortable biking . We
should pay attention to that and use these shared pathways as a model or starting point that we can
improve on. One solution is to build them bigger: the car-free Queen Elizabeth Driveway, Parkway,
Whateverway that we saw earlier is basically an IKEA-sized shared pathway and it’s great. Another
option is to explicitly separate pedestrians and cyclists on the path, a model that Ottawa seems
to be implementing more and more, sometimes with a grass median between pedestrians and cyclists.
Wait a second, go back. Did that say maximum 10 kilometres per hour? Is that a mistake? That has
to be a mistake. The older and narrower pathways have a speed limit of 20 kilometres an hour.
Shared pathways do often have the problem of taking winding, non-functional routes designed
for a joy ride instead of taking you to any actual destination, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
Ottawa’s pathways are getting us most of the way to IKEA and it’s pretty direct: 15 kilometres by
bike compared to 14 by car. There’s a section on the map that looks unnecessarily winding but when
you ride through it’s obvious that it was made to temper the elevation changes of a hill. After
all this riding through farms and forests, we do have the final section to IKEA on a road.
It’s not the best; it’s not the worst. The road itself wasn’t that wide or high-traffic,
in part because of construction in the middle, but there weren’t really any bike lanes for the most
part, the intersections weren’t very nice, and we had some close calls with buses passing us.
And finally we arrive at our destination for this 100% functional, non-recreational trip.
What have we come to IKEA to get? Some footage of IKEA! And also some ice cream, which we eat at
Starbucks while enjoying some wonderfully calming highway noise in the background. All in all,
we’re pretty satisfied with the bike-friendliness of this IKEA destination. Our trip was 80% on
car-free routes (the tractors at the farm don’t count), with 20% using roads shared with cars,
none of which were massive suburban arterials or anything. If you’re looking for more on bikes and
IKEA, Wayne Gong at Mobycon has an analysis of 15 IKEA locations in Canada that ranks Ottawa #3 for
bike-friendliness, after Calgary and Winnipeg. Unfortunately we found that once we actually
arrived the whole mall area was pretty unpleasant outside of a car, but what did we expect?
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget to assemble
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