Highway 174 Safety Study
In October 2009, the City of Ottawa conducted a safety study on Regional Road 174 between Trim and Canaan Road, in response to concerns raised by Cumberland residents. Read the full report at:
http://ottawa.ca/calendar/ottawa/cit...9-COS-PWS-0024
The report contains the following statistics:
* Between January 2003 and December 2007 there were 270 collisions, including five fatalities
* The average daily volume is close to 19,000 vehicles
* The average operating speed is 95 to 104 km per hour
* In all cases, the majority of the accidents were rear-end collisions
While the report proposes short, medium and long-term measures to improve safety, it concludes that neither four-laning the 174 from Trim to Canaan Road nor adding passing lanes can be justified based solely on safety factors and that from a traffic safety perspective, the benefit to the corridor is not as clear (page 15). Many media reports wrongly concluded that the study supported widening the 174.
The CVCA reviewed the safety study and prepared a submission to the Transportation Committee supporting many of the safety measures outlined in the report. We also wrote a number of letters to the editor to clear up the misinformation.
We argue that the current speeds are unsafe, given that the road passes through a residential area. We do not support widening the 174 to four lanes.
We argue that widening will not make the road safer for the many residents who live along the river, that it will divide our community, harm the environment, and that it cannot address the volume of commuter traffic, even in the short-term.
We call for:
* more public transit and a park and ride at Canaan Road
* an alternate route to reduce the volume of high-speed commuting traffic in our community, and
* completing the speed study originally planned for 2011 as soon as possible.