Rural Ottawa deserves better than an afterthought.

Something’s been bothering me lately, and I don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed.

If you live in the rural parts of this city, you’ve probably felt it. Ottawa keeps making decisions about your community without really understanding it.

Look at what’s happened just recently.

A family farm in Manotick, Millers, spent more than $300,000 fighting City Hall just to keep the side businesses that pay for the farm. Snow clearing, trucking, the ordinary work that lets a farm survive when produce alone doesn’t cover it. Any business owner understands that in a heartbeat. Council didn’t.

Sixty-four years of horse racing at the old Rideau Carleton Raceway ended this spring, and the livelihoods that went with it, owners, breeders, trainers, started packing up. The city was busy celebrating a casino. Nobody made sure the racing survived it.

And Alto’s high-speed rail is set to cut through our region while the city signed a non-disclosure agreement that keeps landowners from finding out whose farm is on the line. I’ll have more to say on that one soon.

Three different stories. One thread running through all of them. There’s a name for what all three are chipping away at, even if we don’t say it enough. Rural Culture. The way of life in Ottawa’s rural communities, treated as an afterthought by the people making decisions about it, people who don’t understand it and never tried to.

Here’s the part that ties it together.

Too often the city paints the whole place with the same brush. It takes a standard built for the downtown core and drops it on a country road as if they’re the same thing.

A crosswalk is the clearest example. The formula for whether a corner “warrants” one is built around core traffic counts and core foot traffic. A rural community will never hit those numbers, so the crosswalk never comes, even where kids are crossing a road with nowhere safe to do it.

That’s not a rural standard. That’s a downtown standard with a rural community’s safety left out of it.

I build things for a living. I’ve worked all over this city. A country road isn’t a downtown street, and pretending they’re the same isn’t fairness, it’s laziness. You design for the place in front of you.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to send a short email on each of these, one at a time, so we can really dig in.

But first I want to hear from you.

Where else do you feel like rural Ottawa isn’t being respected? What’s the rule, the decision, or the service in your community that clearly wasn’t built with you in mind?