Cars Won’t Disappear From Ottawa Roads: CRERAR

06/29/2025

Will Hamburg, Germany’s approach to urban transportation work for Ottawa?

Good for Councillor Glen Gower, chairman of ottawa’s transit committee, for taking the time to speak with representatives from other cities worldwide in Hamburg to improve Ottawa’s transit.

Let’s look at some of the parameters involved beginning with climate.

Hamburg has an average annual temperature of 8.9 degrees while Ottawa comes in at an average of 6.8 degrees. In addition, the average annual snowfall in Hamburg is 20 centimetres while the average annual accumulation in Ottawa is 223 centimetres.

Hamburg’s warmer climate takes that city’s bicycle option off the table for most Ottawa’s residents. During the conference, one wonders if Gower spoke to attendees from cities such as Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, Warsaw, or preferably Moscow, whose climate profiles are closer to those of Ottawa, to see how they deal with bicycling.

Let’s move outside Ottawa and look at the the bigger picture.

A number of years ago at a meeting in Ottawa where co-workers from Paris, London and the Netherlands were in attendance, I complained about the price of gasoline after it had surpassed $1 per litre.

When my friend from the Netherlands commented that gas prices at home were in excess of $3 per litre. I reminded him that comparing gas prices was not fair since my car would travel roughly 500 kilometres before I needed to fill it again. That’s a drive slightly farther than the distance from Ottawa to Toronto. If a Hamburg resident decided to drive 500 kilometres, they could travel internationally as far as Copenhagen or Amsterdam. If the Hamburg conference had been held in Berlin, destinations within a 500-kilometre radius would include Warsaw, Prague and Vienna. While gas prices in Europe were higher than here, my associate received better value for his travel dollar.

In addition to passenger vehicles, Europeans have access to Eurorail, a continental railway system which travels through 33 countries in comfort. Canadians, on the other hand, have only one railway service on which to traverse the second largest country in the world.

Gower notes Hamburg wants more non-car options. But Ottawa is not Hamburg and Canada is not Europe.

Canadians love their cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs and, furthermore, we need them to move between our cities and around our large country because other options are limited or don’t work as promised (for example, OC Transpo). When the City of Ottawa drafts its new transportation master plan, it will likely fail if councillors don’t accept the fact that cars will not suddenly disappear from our roads.

Howard Crerar is a project manager and has worked in the software industry for three decades.