For Gina Beaudoin, a staff member at Carleton University, living in Embrun means an arduous 52-kilometre commute to and from work.
Without traffic, a one-way trip takes about 40 minutes on the highway, but during rush hour it can take more than an hour and a half.
To get to work on time at 8:10 a.m., Beaudoin has to leave the house around 6:45 a.m.
“I waste so much gas and time sitting in traffic — those two hours a day I spend in the car could be spent with my kids,” said Beaudoin, a mother of five. “The traffic situation in Ottawa could be improved.”
Ottawans are spending an average of 85 hours a year stuck in traffic, up from 81 hours last year, according to a GPS manufacturer that has declared Ottawa — somewhat controversially — the third most congested city in Canada.
The 2014 traffic index, released by TomTom NV, says the average commute in Ottawa — about 30 minutes without traffic — is delayed by more than 20 minutes every day, nearly doubling the time on the road.
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For the amount of time spent sitting stagnant in your car on the 417 every year, you could work a full-time job for a week, take a couple of long naps, make a road trip to Florida, and still have time to kill.
Beaudoin belongs to a generation of workers caught in a city that’s promising relief with the under-construction LRT but is stuck with extra delays during its construction.
There’s no mystery to the slowdowns. In the morning, traffic slows around Blair Road and crawls from the Split through Nicholas Street, where enough people leave the highway downtown to free up Queensway space.
Dan Tomka drives from the southeast corner of Orléans to an office near the Queensway and Greenbank Road daily. On Tomka’s trip home, the traffic slows around Parkdale Avenue and doesn’t let up until he’s through the LRT construction area.
He calls the trip “miserable.” And when his wife heads back to work after maternity leave (they have a 10-month-old at home) there will be the extra “hard deadline” of picking up the kids from daycare. Transit isn’t an option, Tomka says. “I need the car to pick up the kids,” and also because he’s an IT expert and sometimes he has to travel around the city to take care of problems at different offices.
Shelley McLean has covered traffic with 580 CFRA for 10 years and sees the past year of LRT construction as a whole new level of traffic trouble.
“We saw it last summer, and we’re going to see it again this summer,” during prime construction season, she said.
“It’s been a nightmare. For people coming in from the east end, I don’t know how they have been surviving.”
She singles out Hunt Club Road as the city’s other main trouble spot. “You don’t want to see a collision on Hunt Club because that creates massive headaches.”
“Ottawa is still a very east-west city,” and that’s where the worst traffic lies.
The next-worst spot would be anywhere with construction in the downtown core, McLean says.
In Canada, the average commuter spent almost 90 per cent more time travelling during rush hour traffic in 2014 than any other time of day, almost doubling overall commute times, according to the TomTom Traffic Index report
Ottawa ranked 10th for high traffic-congestion rates in North America — just behind San Jose, California, and Toronto.
But Barry Wellar, a traffic congestion measurement consultant in Ottawa, said traffic in this city is “chicken feed” compared with other urban areas in the world. The only way to reduce the congestion in the city is to encourage and provide commuters with alternatives, according to Wellar, such as railways, public transportation and bicycles.
“Does anybody know an urban area anywhere in the world that’s not congested? Then it’s not urban. It’s not a city. It’s the boonies of Northern Ontario,” said Wellar. “This, quite frankly, is a pile of nonsense. Congestion is a natural urban phenomenon. You don’t have a city without it.”
Vancouver ranked third overall in Canada with Toronto a close second. Montreal took fourth just behind Ottawa in the Canadian rankings. Edmonton and Quebec City tied for fifth and Calgary had the honour of finishing last — though just being mentioned by the annual ranking is itself somewhat of a slight.
Tuesday mornings in Ottawa are the peak time for traffic jams each week, with the commute on Thursday evenings the most congested. Seems people are more relaxed closer to the weekends though: on Friday mornings and Monday nights commuters spend the least time on the highway, according to the report
