Airport Community A Planning Fiasco: BENN

Ottawa City Hall … where ideology overrides reality every very day in every way.

The city recently approved a zoning application for a 660-unit residential community at the corner of Riverside Drive and Hunt Club Road. There are two fundamental problems with the site.

Access to this site is limited. Riverside southbound is the only easy connection. Crossing the median to northbound Riverside is not difficult to implement. Just carve out a slot in the median. Except Riverside is a major north-south route. Congestion is common, as both Riverside South and Manotick disgorge their residents in the morning. The mandatory traffic signal to allow the residents of the new community to access northbound Riverside will just back up the morning traffic. Unless, of course, the plan is to encourage the residents of those two large communities to take the Trillium Line LRT from Limebank Road even if it doesn’t take them to where they want to go.

Traffic on Hunt Club as it approaches the bridge from either side is always backed up. A possible access point is onto Hunt Club westbound, but that would be a very tight fit, given the bridge.

Access to the LRT Trillium Line for the residents of this new community? South Keys LRT station is a long way to the east down the aforementioned over-capacity Hunt Club or alternatively, along the also over capacity Riverside, then onto a not-designed-for-volume Walkley Road.

In short, this location will add significant volume to an overloaded road network. Period. No traffic-flow enhancements are even remotely possible even if the ideologues who populate city hall decided they were prepared to spend the money.

Next up. The site, which is within the Greenbelt and is thus subject to the overriding, but artificially set requirement of intensification, is directly below the secondary runway for Ottawa’s airport. When the wind is out of the south, airliners approaching the airport already have their landing-gear down. When the wind is from the north, airliners are in full-throttle liftoff mode.

How do I know? For a decade my office was just across the river from this intersection less than a kilometre to the north of the site. There were times when I had to ask the person at the other end of my telephone call to wait until the aircraft had passed over. Repeat often between 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m, and again between 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. during heavy flight volume periods.

The answer from staff and council to the concerns expressed by the airport authority is something along the lines of “buyer beware”. Residents will be deemed to know about this before moving in. This is the same logic they use when they require new high rises to offer less than one parking space per unit. How is that working out? Ask the residents on nearby side streets.

So there we have it. Ideology trumps reality. And when so the inevitable complaints flow into the councillors’ offices? Their bewildered constituency staff find themselves having to cite some combination or permutation of:

• We are looking into it;
• This is an unintended consequence; and
• Oops.

Constituency staff are just part of the collateral damage that councillors, planning and traffic management staff don’t care about.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.

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