A Malovey investigation · Ottawa
Ottawa recommends hundreds of kilometres of bike routes that offer no physical protection. Just a sign, or a line of paint. This is where cyclists keep getting hit on them.
One intersection
At Elgin Street and Laurier Avenue, twelve people on bikes were struck by drivers between 2015 and 2019. Five in 2016 alone, the worst single year at any location in the city.
Elgin Street here is a route the City of Ottawa recommends cyclists take. It is a “suggested route”: no barrier, no separation. Just paint and a sign.
Zoom out
Elgin isn't unusual. The city has drawn roughly 487 km of suggested routes: ordinary roads it marks as cycling routes without building anything to protect the people riding them.
The network is a hierarchy. Protected lanes physically separate bikes from traffic. Painted lanes mark a space with a stripe. And suggested routes, by far the most common, offer neither.
Only about 39 km of the network is physically protected. Suggested routes outnumber it more than twelve to one.
Every red dot is a location where a cyclist was struck between 2015 and 2019: 1,416 cyclist collisions in all. Bigger dots mean more crashes at that spot.
Watch where they land.
451 of those collisions, across 314 locations, happened on the suggested-route network itself, the streets the city tells cyclists to use.
At 75 of those locations, cyclists were hit more than once over the five years. Repeatedly, on the same unprotected streets.
Cyclist collisions on suggested routes, 2015–2019
Locations on Ottawa's suggested-route network with the most cyclist collisions.
The bigger picture
Elgin & Laurier is the worst, but it sits at the top of a long list. These are the suggested-route locations where Ottawa cyclists were struck most often over five years.
None of these locations offered physical protection. Each one is a place the city's own network marks as a route to ride, and each one hit multiple cyclists.
We're counting collisions, not comparing crash rates between lane types. Protected lanes are built exactly where cycling is busiest, so a naïve “crashes per kilometre” comparison is misleading, and we don't have ridership data to correct for it.
What the data does show plainly: real, repeated harm is accumulating on the unprotected routes Ottawa actively recommends.
On the ground
Streets you can name, and what it has cost to ride them.
What “upgrading” looks like
Turning a suggested route into a protected one means a curb, a bollard, a raised separation: something physical between a person on a bike and two tonnes of moving metal. Ottawa has done it before: Laurier Avenue's own segregated lane, a block from the worst intersection in this story, is proof it's possible.
Bike Ottawa has mapped this gap for years and pushes the City to close it. The City's cycling infrastructure plans decide which suggested routes finally get built for real.
Suggested isn't safe. It's just cheaper.