From the Ottawa Citizen letters page, February 12, 2020:
Re: Cities of Ottawa and Gatineau need to bridge their differences, Feb. 6.
Columnist Mohammed Adam wrote hopefully about the potential for a new era of cooperation and consensus towards an interprovincial transportation plan. This hope appears to be based on the fact that the National Capital Commission is spearheading a new study on the topic and that the mayors of both cities in the National Capital Region seem to be united on the position that new investment should be focused on transit solutions, not a new bridge.
What Adam does not mention, nor do either of the mayors in their recent communications (for instance, Mayor Jim Watson’s State of the City 2020 address), is the challenge of more than 500,000 interprovincial transport trucks winding their way through Ottawa’s downtown each year, a problem that has been ongoing for the past 50 years.
Who is talking about this problem? Who is going to take seriously the importance of getting these trucks out of the downtown? Is there any other municipality in Canada that funnels so many through trucks right into the core of their city? Any interprovincial plan without a solution to this problem is no plan at all.
John Verbaas, Ottawa