You know you’ve been covering a com-munity a long time when an issue you wrote about nearly 30 years ago is back in the headlines. In this case it’s the idea of building a ring road around Ottawa, from Orléans to Stittsville through Osgoode.

The idea has been dusted off and dragged out of the closet by Beacon Hill-Cyrville councillor Tim Tierney, who wants to put it back in the city’s transportation master plan and make it a priority over another interprovincial bridge.

The irony is that when a ring road was first being proposed in the mid 1990s it was in the context of being connected with a interprovincial bridge at Petrie Island.

Both the ring road and the interprovincial bridge were being pushed by former Cumberland mayor Brian Coburn and his colleagues on Cumberland town council. This was long before the municipalities that made up the former region of Ottawa-Carleton were merged together in 2001.

Coburn’s idea was to link Cumberland to both Hwy. 417 and Hwy. 416 which was just being built at the time. As a result, Cumberland would become the eastern hub for commercial and industrial development in the region.

To that end, Coburn managed to convince his colleagues on regional council to build the North South Link from Innes Road to the 417, which would eventually be named Frank Kenny Road.

The whole idea fell apart when Petrie Island as a possible site for an interprovincial bridge was rejected for obvious reasons and the ring road began to be referred to as the road to nowhere, largely because it would be too far south to do any good.

The idea was shelved, to never see the light of day again until Tierney pulled it off the shelf and dusted it off at last week’s infrasturcture and transportation committee.

Somewhere Brian Coburn is smiling.

Whether or not a ring road makes any more sense today than it did 30 years ago is a matter of debate.

It would definitely be useful for Orléans residents who want a quick route to Hwy. 416 and Hwy. 7 without having to go through Ottawa and deal with traffic on the Queensway, and vice versa for folks in Kanata and Stittsville who want to go to Montréal.

It would also be useful for commercial truck traffic trying to get to the south end of the city.

As for the potential impact the ring road would have on traffic on the Queensway or Hunt Club road, it would likely be minimal if it’s built too far south.
A ring road would also cost hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when we still have to pay the tab for Stage 2 of the LRT Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure we still haven’t paid off Stage 1 yet.

Tierney’s motion to put a future ring road in the Transportation Master Plan (TMP) as done more to throw smoke on the federal government’s desire to build another interprovincial bridge than anything else.

The TMP sets out the city’s transportation infrastructure priorities for the next 20 to 30 years.

The mere thought that the feds want to push ahead with a bridge is stupefying.
While study after study has come up with Kettle Island as the best location to build a bridge, the fact that it would have to be linked into the Aviation Parkway and the Hwy 174/417 split means that it will be met with intense opposition. Plus time has made a bridge redundant.

When it was first being studied 15 years ago, federal government workers were still having to report to their office five days a week.

When the last interprovincial bridge study was released in 2013, it showed that the vast majority of people who would be using the crossing would be Gatineau residents coming and going from Ottawa. The split between Quebec and Ontario users was between 80/20 and 90/10.

The study also showed that a new bridge at Kettle Island would only have a minor impact on interprovincial truck traffic
downtown.

The truth is that the desire to build an interprovincial bridge or a ring road is based more on wishful thinking than reality.

Orléans commuters would be much better off with an HOV lane on the 174 than either of the aforementioned and it would be far less expensive. Too bad it’s equally unlikely to be built anytime soon.

(If you wish to comment on this or any other View Point column please write to Fred Sherwin at fsherwin@orleansstar.ca)