Lowertown residents deserve better than King Edward Avenue | Opinion

A truck passes through the intersection of King Edward Avenue and Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026. Photo by Spencer Colby /Postmedia

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This may come as a surprise to anyone not collecting old-age security benefits, but King Edward Avenue was once a gorgeous residential street lined with nice houses, stately elms, and a broad, grassy median in the middle where families held picnics.

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But then, in 1965, a freeway came along and ruined it.

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And over the ensuing six decades, the street has been allowed to deteriorate to an urban blight. North of Rideau Street in particular, King Edward alternates between resembling either (a) a stretch of the Queensway, with a half dozen lanes of trucks and other vehicles barrelling by at speeds well in excess of the posted limit; or (b) a stretch of the Queensway, with a half dozen lanes of trucks and other vehicles sitting bumper-to-bumper, with all the attendant noise and fumes.

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I suspect that Queen Victoria’s son, for whom the street was named, would not be amused.

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The problem, in a nutshell, is that Hwy. 5 in Gatineau, a multi-lane controlled-access freeway, empties onto King Edward Avenue like a fire hose into a kitchen sink. Much of that traffic, including thousands of trucks each day, simply wants to get to Hwy. 417, but there is no corresponding freeway in Ottawa to accommodate that.

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Instead, vehicles snake along King Edward, Rideau, Waller and Nicholas — a 4-km stretch that is improbably an official part of Canada’s national highway system, despite clearly not having been designed for that amount or type of traffic.

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

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When the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge opened in 1965, planners contemplated a six-lane sunken freeway through Lowertown and Sandy Hill — parallel to King Edward along Nelson Street and Henderson Avenue — connecting the bridge with the Queensway. Residents fought it and the plan, eventually deemed too expensive, was dropped, sparing Ottawa the sort of life-sucking urban expressway that North American cities were beginning to regret and that still probably has Jane Jacobs spinning in her grave.

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A truck passes through the intersection of King Edward Avenue and Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026. Photo by Spencer Colby /Postmedia

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So the freeway was abandoned, but the traffic it was meant to carry wasn’t. Much of it instead ended up on King Edward and surrounding streets, leaving the residential neighbourhood to become the missing highway.

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“It was never meant to be a truck route,” Rideau-Vanier Coun. Stéphanie Plante says of the King Avenue corridor, “and then we never fixed it.”

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The problem isn’t just aesthetic. A decade ago, a city report examining the feasibility of a truck tunnel between the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge and Hwy. 417 acknowledged that Lowertown and Sandy Hill were “substantially affected” by the traffic. Truck traffic, it said, had “for decades, negatively affected the liveability and safety” of residents and visitors.

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“Noise and air pollution, dangers due to the speed and volume of cars and trucks, and the aesthetics of having a major truck route through the downtown of Canada’s capital are all longstanding issues of concern,” the report added.

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Pedestrian safety has been a particular concern. At one point Rideau and King Edward had the highest frequency of pedestrian collisions of any intersection in the city. And every now and then, we’re tragically reminded of that