Abstract Manager

The City of Ottawa is growing and expected to surpass 1.4 million residents by 2046. The City aims to be more liveable, affordable, equitable, and resilient to change. With changes to working and commuting patterns, the City aims to have a flexible, dependable, safe, and efficient transportation network for moving people and goods across the city. The City is updating its Transportation Master Plan (TMP), a strategic framework that uses various methodologies, to achieve the City’s transportation goals.

The first part of the TMP focused on developing comprehensive policies, while the second part is underway and will ultimately recommend capital projects and investment scenarios to support the City’s transportation objectives. The process includes identifying transportation needs and opportunities, supported by a household origin destination (OD) survey conducted in the fall of 2022 that captures a snapshot of how people travel in a post-pandemic Ottawa. The analysis of these travel trends provides insight into how travel patterns have changed in the past decade, and what is expected in the future. The identified needs and opportunities, supported by land use projections, travel demand forecasting, policies, and extensive consultation efforts, will lead to identifying possible projects, developing an ultimate network, prioritizing projects, and determining how much the City should invest in each travel mode.

This presentation will outline the strategic process for part 2 of the TMP and focus on how the analysis of the travel trends supports the identification of travel needs. It will discuss how drivers of change, such as population growth, the pandemic and evolving work patterns, new infrastructure, and new technology, influence travel behaviour in Ottawa. Key trends from the OD survey analysis, such as increased active transportation use, changing commuting patterns, and declining transit ridership, will be presented, with discussion on how they impact the needs and opportunities and how they relate to the City’s policies and objectives. The presentation will highlight the remnant travel impacts of the pandemic, and how the TMP aims to be reflective of a post-pandemic Ottawa and to be resilient to uncertainty through modelling of various work-from-home scenarios.