Today, I'd like to write about biking routes to nothern Kanata when coming from points east.
Ottawa has a lot of high tech companies., and a lot of it is based in northern Kanata. The offices are spread across some 3 or 4 story buildings, and Alcatel-Lucent has some high rises. There's a luxury hotel, The Brookstreet, and a golf course.
So how do all these people get to work? You can tell in this satellite view that most of this land is allocated to parking lots. I do see quite a few cyclists too, but the biking infrastructure doesn't reflect that.
A lot of staff probably commute from nearby communities like parts of northern Kanata (Morgan's Grant, Kanata Lakes) and southern Kanata. I'll talk about those routes in other articles.
If you're coming from Bell's corners, Barrhaven, Centrepoint, Westboro, downtown or anywhere in else in the cities formerly known as Nepean and Ottawa, there are two transit points you end up biking through:
Bell's corners
This will get you to Barrhaven, Bell's Corners and other places in south western Ottawa
There's two routes that are possible:
- along Timm Road, then north on Eagleson and March. I don't know what Timm is like; the overpass over the 417 is narrow and dangerous. There is a bike lane along March (where five cyclists were strick last weekend).
- north on Moodie, west along the NCC Watts Creek bike path, get off at Burke and down the rest of Carling. Moodie is busy and the 417 overpass is rough. The bike path is really very nice, but being dumped onto the western part of Carling terribly paved. I'll talk more about that in another post.
Often, it makes sense to take a different route depending on the direction. Crossing major roads (like Carling) is very dangerous.
Andrew Hayden Park
This is a connection point for other parts of Ottawa like Westboro and downtown. It hooks up with some other bike routes.
It, too, has two major routes to get to Kanata north:
- straight west down Carling. This starts by being on the 60km/hr road to Moodie, then it is a nicely paved shoulder, although along a 80km/hr stretch. Then it gets bad; there's a CN train bridge (worth a few more articles) and again the nasty western stretch of Carling.
- along Corkstown (a residential, 40km/hr road), and along the Greenbelt bike path. Then north along Burke to Carling, over that nasty stretch mentioned above.
How to figure this out
The only way to know these things is to bike the route many times and do some detours on some trips to figure out what the alternatives are.
The City of Ottawa bike maps don't tell you enough. They don't point out the major obstacles (like the Carling train bridge), tell you where the paved shoulders.
The signage is really poor. Take the photo below... this is the turnoff needed to get from Carling through Burke to the Greenbelt bike path. This is an exceptionally useful connection, but it is uninviting (the barking dogs 100m in don't help either). You'd never know this was such a convenient connection!
What we can do
The thing we all want is to get bike paths that connect actually common source and destinations. This will be difficult.
Something else is to address the hazards along the way (pave some shoulders, actually draw bike lanes on them). I hope this is something we can get in city budgets.
Signage, I'd think, would be easiest to address. Add some signs that indicate common locations. You see some of these on some NCC paths, but never on City of Ottawa roads.
Information is something else. Figuring out the above took me several months, and most of it was by word of mouth.
I think we can do a lot better at at making major bicycle commuting routes more friendly.
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