Get Ottawa moving
Fix the basics / traffic
Get Ottawa moving.
You can’t talk seriously about traffic in Ottawa without talking about the ring road. Alex’s position is on the record: a southern ring road as a provincial 400-series highway, built and maintained by Queen’s Park. Read it here. This plan is about everything else: the roads we already have, and how they’re run.
Ottawa runs more than 1,200 traffic signals from a Traffic Control Centre that opened in the 1970s, staffed from 6 am to 7 pm, Monday to Friday, where operators watch cameras at about 70 intersections and adjust timing by hand when they see a problem. The rest run their pre-set time-of-day plans, and after 7 and all weekend every light in the city does. About 70 percent of them have a sensor that knows a car or a pedestrian has arrived. It’s 1960s technology. Not one adjusts its timing to how traffic is actually moving along the road.
So here is the next plank in Alex Lawson’s platform, and it is two things: smarter lights, starting with a free application in the first 100 days, and road work with an end date.
Ottawa has grown. We can’t manage traffic like it’s 1975.
Quebec City signed on to Google’s Project Green Light in August 2025 and has already reported positive results. Vancouver started its pilot in July 2026. Peterborough, a city of about 85,000 people, has been running adaptive signals that respond to real traffic since 2021. The capital is still turning its lights on a weekday schedule.
Smarter lights
No new cameras, because the data comes from the cars, not the intersection. Every phone running Google Maps in a car is already reporting where it is and how fast it’s moving. Google takes that driving data, in aggregate, sees where traffic stops and starts at every signal in the city, and sends the city a recommendation: this light, this time of day, this many seconds. City engineers check it and change the timing plan in the controller that is already there. Free during the research phase, and on Vancouver’s terms: advisory only, no access to city systems, the city can walk away on 60 days’ notice. If staff have already applied, Alex will inherit the paperwork and hurry it along.
This one does need hardware, and that is what the money buys: detectors at each intersection so the signal can see what is coming and change its timing every cycle. An adaptive signal pilot on the corridors the City’s own collision and traffic count data say are the worst in Ottawa: Hunt Club from Riverside to Greenbank, Baseline from Woodroffe to Clyde, Innes and St. Laurent in the east, Hazeldean and Terry Fox in Kanata. Hunt Club at Riverside alone had 121 collisions in the two most recent years the City has published, on 72,000 vehicles a day. The pilot covers the 100 worst signals in the city, at roughly $50,000 an intersection, about what Peterborough paid, with the full ranked list published before a dollar is spent. Pilot, measure, publish, scale.
Road work with an end date
Ottawa charges a contractor a flat $1,748 to close a lane, once, for as long as the job takes. The permit has no clock on it: no daily charge, no per-lane charge, and no penalty for leaving pylons on a road where nobody is working. Toronto charges by the square metre of road occupied, by the month, scaled to how busy the street is, plus $894 a day for a full lane closure downtown. In Ottawa, a lane closed for a week costs the same as a lane closed for a season. So lanes stay closed.
Lanes
The rule for every closure on a City road. Overstay the end date and the fee escalates, every day, until the road is open.
The current flat $1,748 fee becomes occupancy pricing on the Toronto model: by the square metre of road taken, by the day, scaled to how busy the street is. A contractor who takes one lane for a week pays for one lane for a week. One who fences off half a main street for a season pays for that. Whatever it collects goes to road renewal.
When the City is the one hiring the contractor, the tender says how many lane-days the job gets and when the road reopens. Go over, and it comes off the invoice. This is the term the City’s LRT contract on the 417 at Woodroffe did not have.
Least expensive first
The Green Light application costs nothing. The adaptive pilot is capital, in the range of $5 million for 100 intersections, spread over two years and funded from the existing transportation capital envelope, not a new tax line. Putting an end date on a permit is staff time on information the City already holds. Occupancy pricing replaces one flat fee with a fee that scales with how much road is taken and for how long, so a small job that finishes on time can pay less than today and a big one that drags on pays for every day. Whatever it collects goes to road renewal. The full plank shows the math and every source.
Ottawa deserves better.