By Marc Aubin
In 1998, I joined the King Edward Avenue Task Force. Over the years, I learned a few things. First of all, the City does not care about the downtown truck route. City staff have always been driven primarily by the need to accommodate single-car commuter traffic and large tractor-trailers. Never mind that good public policy and infrastructure could lead to a vast increase in the use of public transit. Forget the idea that large tractor-trailers should be for inter-city goods transport, and smaller delivery trucks could do the job in the City.
the noise and traffic on King Edward Avenue.
In 1965, the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge was built at a turning point in city-planning and road-transportation policy. The view in the 1950s and 1960s was that inner-city highways and the total demolition of historic neighbourhoods would hasten the arrival of the future. Of course, many so-called planning experts did not see historic neighbourhoods as having any value.
This is when people like Jane Jacobs in New York City came on the scene. She lived in one of the most extraordinary cities in the world, New York City, and observed the streets every day. She saw the complexities of the “habitat” of the city and how humans lived in such places. She could see the value of a life without cars, a place where residents could walk anywhere to get what they needed, and have unstructured opportunities to interact with others and build community.
Jacobs was not alone. There were people in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver who saw the foolishness of inner-city highways and “urban renewal” (that is, demolition) of communities. Even Ottawa had its unsung heroes. They stopped the construction of a sunken freeway through Lowertown and Sandy Hill. That freeway would have connected the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge to the Queensway. In Toronto, they stopped the construction of a similar highway, the Spadina Expressway
We are now living in the shadow of these great urban heroes of the 1960s and 1970s. Sadly, the civil- engineering and urban-planning professions seemed to have learned almost nothing. While we were able to slow down the evisceration of older communities, an oligarchy of developers has continued to build suburbs rather than densifying in the city. And the demands of those suburban single-occupancy car commuters for three to four hours each day is still what drives decisions about King Edward Avenue.
We have been promised solutions since 1965, including a bypass through New Edinburgh connecting to the Vanier Parkway, the Kettle Island Bridge and now a tunnel. Founded in 1986, the King Edward Avenue Task Force tried to advocate for Lowertown at City Hall. We fought huge battles to protect corridors for future freeways to support the false promises of a graveyard of politicians and city planners from over the years.
At one point, we asked ourselves the question: what if there is never a bridge or tunnel? What should King Edward Avenue and Lowertown look like? The task force advocated for a return of King Edward Avenue to a four-lane configuration, and its transformation (or rather restoration) to a grand boulevard. But that is a whole other story that many of you have heard, and yet another example of how this city wants it both ways. They want to protect other communities’ quality of life, but not restore ours. Not even if it means single-occupancy commuters from Gatineau lose a few minutes on their drive each day.
Marc Aubin is the former chair of the King Edward Avenue Task Force