It's Jamie

I caught this from another angle and then joined them to clear out the drain on the other side of the street. The little one had fun floating things down the resulting river.

The puddle was great traffic calming though.

Another one. Bronson and Catherine.

Needed infrastructure work is being deferred because of your low tax increases, with the backlog growing every year. There's a $2.6-billion backlog just in road resurfacing. At some point we will need to pay for it, and that ENORMOUS tax increase will be YOUR fault, not a future mayor's.

Just raise my damn taxes and provide me with actually functioning city services. If I wanted low taxes and poor services I'd go live in the middle of nowhere, not in a city.

The 2025 multi-residential tax ratio is at 1.30, next year it will be 1.20. The mayor could increase taxes by 12.39% in 2026 without triggering an AGI for those older multi-residential properties.

I think the report makes better argument for banning cars from the road entirely than it does for keeping RTOR.

"Drivers are speeding, aggressive, angry, distracted, and disobey traffic laws. If we try to stop them from running over people in this crosswalk, they'll just run them over in another!"

Anytime I go down Booth there's a group of people with thousands of dollars worth of clearly stolen bikes dealing drugs out in the open. Not sure how that hasn't been dealt with.

On multiple occasions I've seen posts for stolen bikes, and then I go and I find the exact bike there.

I've been trying to get data from Ottawa Fire on the number of calls they respond to for vehicle collisions vs other calls. They break down the numbers in their annual report by type, but collisions get mixed in with Fire/Hazmat/Rescue/Medical/Miscellaneous depending on the nature of each collision.

Even the right on red report yesterday was saying that it would be dangerous to ban RTOR because pedestrians might have the gall to expect that drivers actually follow the rules, except that drivers are aggressive, distracted, and not paying attention to people in front of their vehicles.

The <50% hardscaped was already there. But people couldn't widen their driveways beyond the width of their garages or laneways. If they had a walkway, it couldn't be attached to the driveway through the right of way, and they couldn't park on it. This now legalizes that.

I think the one upcoming with biggest impact will be the bridge over the Rideau Canal. There aren't many other ways to cross the canal, and they'll also have the QED and Colonel By closed as they do it.

Committee passed this new by-law unanimously. It was called "a big step forward" and "a good news story".

More paved surfaces and more space dedicated to car storage is the complete opposite of what we need in this city. I don't think many councillors even knew what they were approving here.

If we raise speed limits to like 300km/h, speed limit compliance would go way up.

"Improved compliance" isn't about addressing non-complaint driveways. What they mean is they're changing the by-law to make them legal as they are. Then By-Law officers have less work to do enforcing these currently illegal widenings because this will "bring them into compliance".

Zoomed in with ward boundaries, showing Tierney's Beacon Hill-Cyrville vs downtown.

It says if we ban RTOR, pedestrians might actually expect drivers to follow traffic laws and then get hit by a driver turning while crossing legally. Basically admitting that the only reason there aren't more collisions is that pedestrians currently expect drivers to turn without yielding to them.

The report says repeatedly that drivers are aggressive, speed, don't pay attention, ignore signage, and are distracted.

I'm not able to filter out specifically right turn on red collisions, but here is every pedestrian/cyclist collision at a traffic light (2017-2024).

This RTOR debate can be framed as safety vs traffic flow, but traffic certainly doesn't flow when the road is closed for a collision. And then this staff report is actually trying to claim that it would be more dangerous to not allow RTOR, because drivers would get angry and break traffic rules...

Far too often drivers blow full speed into the crosswalk, looking only to their left for other cars. I've been nearly hit countless times. If it weren't for people walking and biking constantly looking out for drivers that can't follow basic traffic laws, there would be far more injuries and deaths.

I used to be pretty adamant that right turn on red was safe and would be bothered when not being able to do it driving in Montreal. But, I actually stop behind the line and make sure it's safe to turn. It can actually be done safely, unfortunately the vast majority of drivers do not do this.

And let's not forget about all the car vs. car collisions that happen because of right turn on red.

I've personally seen 6 collisions at Bronson and Catherine in just the past few years, but not a single one since they added a no right on red sign.

It's a really stupid maneuver to allow.

I looked at this a while back, but didn't calculate percentages. There has been a significant drop in injuries while the total number of collisions is about the same as 2019.

I personally think it was the speed cameras, but we'll see once the 2026 data is out.

"Don't waste peoples' time with noise and grandstanding", says Ottawa City Council's leading expert at wasting peoples' time with noise and grandstanding.

This doesn't include the vast majority of pedestrian and cyclist collisions with Minor and Minimal injuries, or all the crashes caused by RTOR involving only drivers.

From 2019 - 2022, for bike/ped collisions, there were 960 total collisions at traffic signals, and 1847 total across the city.

This table from the report, which is only for Major and Fatal injuries (eg. broken bones, brain damage, death), has 180 people in just 4 years. The report says RTOR restrictions wouldn't apply in 90% of these cases, but that still leaves 4 or 5 people each year that it does apply to.

"only two countries in the world".

... not quite.

Installed in 1964.

Fun fact: this watermain is 90 years younger than the watermain under York Street by the OTTAWA sign in the ByWard Market (1874).

Imagine adding onto the cost of every apartment tower going up in the core millions of dollars in DCs to pay for new suburban roads, and then also admitting that those same roads have zero benefit to anybody else in the city except for those suburban growth areas.

When are they going to fix this?

They're currently paying $269,705/yr in property taxes, at a (2016) assessed value of $9,154,000.