The City of Ottawa is good at talking about bike lanes. It is less good at actually building bike lanes. Although everybody seems to agree that bike lanes are an important element of any forward-looking transportation strategy, the system of bike lanes in Ottawa is largely lacking. If not for the NCC pathways, it would be a full blown disaster.
Case in point, the bike lane that travels from the Glebe, up Percy and Albert Streets to....well towards downtown. This is a primary bicycle commuting route to downtown which relies mostly on secondary streets. There is a lovely separated lane heading north from Catherine Street to Gloucester perhaps. And then cyclists are on their own. The lane doesn't take them into downtown, or even to Wellington St. to connect to the NCC pathway. The city pretends that the lanes continue by putting up signs with pictures of bicycles, but in reality, to get anywhere worth going involves mixing in with traffic and even riding on sidewalks ("shared" bike lanes). It is a true embarassment.
Ottawa spends hundreds of millions of dollars on roads every year. If Montreal and Toronto can take major downtown streets and create dedicated bike lanes, surely Ottawa can finish the bike lane on Percy and Bay one of these years.
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