Kettle Island Bridge … again
John Verbaas
Over the last two months, the topic of a new Ottawa River bridge at Kettle Island has been repeatedly in the press. The latest announcements by Liberal MP for Gatineau Steven Mackinnon indicate that the current Liberal government is more committed than ever before to move this project forward. Specifically, funds have now been committed to hire a technical consultant who will take the next steps in the project design and will move the project through the federal environmental impact assessment process. This process includes a public consultation phase which we should hear more about over the next year.
Several different studies over the past 30 years have all recommended Kettle Island as the best location for a new bridge across the river. However, the project has been embroiled in so much controversy that previous attempts to move it forward have been abandoned. The latest initiative, however, does appear to be the most serious attempt thus far.
Opinions are wide-ranging on whether this time will be any different. As has been noted in the press, the public announcement organized by Steven Mackinnon was not attended by any elected official from any of the three levels of government from the Ottawa side of the river. The Chair of the City of Ottawa Public Works and Infrastructure Committee was reported as saying that the government should start the whole process again instead of moving forward with the Kettle Island route. Mayor Sutcliffe was quoted as saying, “I’ve never asked for another bridge”.
From a Sandy Hill perspective, the main interest in this proposed bridge is the extent to which it will be effective at removing interprovincial truck traffic from the King Edward/Rideau/Waller/Nicholas corridor. Several recent studies have suggested that a new bridge at Kettle Island would fail to attract even half of the interprovincial truck traffic out of downtown. Some feel it would be possible to ban all interprovincial trucks from the downtown and force them to this new route. Yet, the last serious effort to move forward on a bridge at this location saw the City of Gatineau swiftly pass a resolution saying it was unacceptable to shift all of the truck traffic to the new route and called on the City of Ottawa to leave the downtown route open to trucks. Who will decide how trucks will get divided up if a new bridge is built? The picture is unclear at best at this point.
Some things to watch closely over the next year as public consultations are planned is how the project will be designed to connect the bridge from where it lands on the Ottawa shore via the Aviation Parkway to the 417/174 highways. Currently there is no way for vehicles to move between the Aviation Parkway and the 417 to/from downtown nor to connect with the 174 to/from Orleans. Additionally, the major intersections of the Aviation Parkway with Montreal Road and with Coventry Road will need significant expansions if they are to accommodate more than 1000 transport trucks per day and 20,000—30,000 additional cars per day. Once implemented, trucks and cars that are intended to be shifted from the downtown to this new corridor will face a trip between the 417 and Hwy 50 of 10 km in length passing through anywhere between 10 and 13 traffic light intersections. Can this become the new primary interprovincial route between the Hwy 417 and 50? Sandy Hill residents will have to size up the risks and evaluate the possibility that a new bridge at Kettle Island will at best change the interprovincial truck traffic through the downtown from today’s 2600 trucks per day to 1300 or so trucks per day. Will that be enough to change King Edward and Rideau streets into the kind of people-friendly streets we wish for? Expect to see a lot more on this topic over the next year.