Mayor Jim Watson says he disagrees with a pair of European tourists who wrote a letter to him and other politicians decrying what they say is a “car culture” in Ottawa and other Canadian cities.
“While they’re entitled to their criticism, I don’t think it’s merited,” he said. “The feedback I get from tourists, without fail, is that they’re impressed with Ottawa being a clean and green city.”
In an open letter to the Citizen and several politicians, Holly Chabowski, 30, and her girlfriend Nanna Sorensen, 23, from England and Denmark respectively, say their overwhelming memory of their five-week trip in Canada is “one of cars, traffic, parking and the related obesity and unfulfilled communities.”
They visited a handful of cities including Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax. It’s unclear from their letter where exactly in Ottawa they visited.
Watson acknowledged that Ottawa is “decades behind” many European cities on light rail. “Their lack of oil production plus their compact nature has allowed them to have world-class transit systems that obviously we’re envious of. We’re playing catch-up to a certain degree,” he said.
However, he suggested it’s unfair to apply European standards to a city of Ottawa’s geographical size.
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“Copenhagen is about 88 square kilometres and Ottawa is about 2,800 square kilometres,” he said. “We have 32 times the land mass, so we don’t have the luxury of everything crammed together in a small European city. We have people that live a hundred kilometres from our downtown core. There is a need for streets and there’s a need for places for people to park.”
Watson said the city is taking strides toward promoting growth that encourages walking, cycling and transit, such as halting the expansion of the urban boundary. And he said the city has added more bike lanes, trees and green space.
“We recognize it’s very expensive to engage in urban sprawl, and it’s in our collective best interests both environmentally and economically that we have proper growth that encourages the use of transit and alternative modes of transportation,” he said.
However, one expert says he has been decrying the car-centric culture in Canadian cities for decades, even as cities like Ottawa have sprawled outward.
“You have to understand just how deep a hole we’ve dug ourselves and how hard it is to get out,” said Barry Wellar, professor emeritus of geography at the University of Ottawa and an urban planning expert.
“Ottawa has itself an immense hole. When you do things wrong year after year, decade after decade, instant solutions don’t happen.”
Wellar said he wrote a paper nearly 40 years ago, in 1975, titled Taking Steps Toward the End of the Automobile Era. He said much of the advice in that paper, such as giving buses the ability to control traffic lights, has not been followed.
“I wrote 39 years ago what these ladies are writing about now,” he said. “My guess it these ladies from Europe could come back in 40 years and it’ll be déjà vu all over again. … We have a car-centric society.”
