Can City Council pause housing development in Stittsville until Carp Road gets widened, or until LRT construction is finished?
That’s a question I get a lot from residents, and it sounds like a straightforward and logical idea. But under Provincial legislation, the answer is simply “no.”
We can stop a residential development if it doesn’t have water and sewer capacity, or if there’s no hydro hook-up. But as long as there is some road access, construction can proceed. (We can’t stop development because of a lack of schools or family doctors either.)
It’s hugely frustrating for residents. Our suburbs are growing fast right now. But the new transit projects and road upgrades planned to support this growth may not arrive for years.
This is frustrating for City Councillors too. In fact, last year City Council directed staff to “review and report on the feasibility of establishing transportation infrastructure conditions that must be satisfied before subdivision or high-density development applications can be approved in suburban expansion area lands”. In other words: can we hold off development until roads and transit are ready for it?
We got a response from the City’s transportation planning department last month. It acknowledges that rapid growth—especially in suburban areas—puts increasing pressure on the transportation system. And staff acknowledge the need to invest in growth-related transportation infrastructure projects, partly with the proceeds from Development Charges. But in terms of delaying development to allow transportation infrastructure to catch up, the answer is clear. The City does not have the legislative authority to do this. (You can read the entire memo here.)
The City can (and does) require developers to build “local services,” meaning transportation infrastructure to service a specific site. These include residential roads and sidewalks that are internal to the neighbourhood, plus traffic signals, roundabouts, and intersections where the local roads meet major collectors and arterials.
But we can’t require them to pay for a major upgrade to Carp Road, for example. That’s the City of Ottawa’s responsibility.
We also can’t make a development conditional on transit service. In our new Official Plan, we tried to add policy to require transit service in new neighbourhoods, but the Province overruled us.
Unfortunately, this technical answer isn’t very satisfying. The current system is not fair to residents who wait for years for new infrastructure while watching local roads get more congested and more dangerous.
So what can we do?
One thing we can do is work with developers to address community traffic and infrastructure concerns. For example, I worked with Lépine and they agreed to delay construction of part of the development at 5000 Robert Grant Avenue until Robert Grant Avenue is built to at least Maple Grove Road.
Sometimes developers will voluntarily choose to build major road projects ahead of the City’s schedule, when they need them for access to the neighbourhood. A good example is the Robert Grant Avenue extension from Abbott to Hazeldean. Developers advanced the construction to give better access to Minto’s Abbott’s Run neighbourhood and will be reimbursed later by the City.
We can also request developer-funded “early service agreements” to bring transit sooner to a neighbourhood. This kind of agreement was in place in the early stages of the Blackstone neighbourhood. Again, it was voluntary for the developer. Meanwhile, staff are changing City policies so that we can get roundabouts or traffic signals installed earlier at major intersections. Instead of waiting for several years until there’s enough traffic to “warrant” traffic lights, the intent is to get these built at the very start of a subdivision project, before people move in.
There’s a great example of this at Fernbank and Edenwylde in Stittsville. The intersection didn’t technically qualify for traffic lights under the old policy, and so residents have been living with a dangerous pedestrian crossing for several years now. Traffic lights will finally be installed next year. Under the new policy, however, those traffic lights would likely have been installed at the start of construction.
Same thing for stop signs and pedestrian crossings. The old policy only allowed for installation once there was enough traffic and people in the neighbourhood. The new policy would require them built from the get-go. That will improve safety, and should be less expensive too.
City staff are also making changes to financing. Council recently approved an “Agile Capital Budgeting Pilot for Road Growth Projects” to remove bottlenecks and get more projects started. Staff are also starting design and property acquisition sooner. All of these changes would likely have helped get shovels in the ground sooner for the Carp Road upgrade.
The funding conundrum
The biggest figurative roadblock to getting roads and transit built faster is funding. Most major projects are funded through Development Charges, which can take a long time to accumulate before a project can start. We could borrow money to beef up our roads budget, but municipalities operate under strict limits to how much we can borrow. Plus, the cost of interest gets passed onto your property tax bill—and that is significant when the debt is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
I’m cautiously optimistic that we may be on the cusp of a new municipal-provincial-federal funding arrangement for infrastructure. The Development Charge Reduction Program includes replacing DC’s on new homes with a direct transfer of up-front funds to municipalities. If that becomes a permanent program and funding source, it could help cities advance more of their transportation projects in a faster timeframe. We’ll see.
So in the near term, growth is likely to continue outpacing infrastructure. But if the City and Province can accelerate road and transit projects through policy changes and better financing arrangements, the gap will start to shrink—not by slowing development, but by building infrastructure faster.
Map of planned transportation infrastructure in Stittsville
