Apartment 613 has new columnist — he’s the new city councilor for Rideau-Vanier ward, Mathieu Fleury. He introduced himself to readers this week and then touched on the kind of approach he wants to take to the business of the City:
I hope to find proactive and preventative solutions to your problems. My educational background in the health sciences taught me the importance of being preventive. I was once told that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and I couldn’t agree more. I think that prevention is an important idea to bring to municipal politics, because finding proactive solutions can allows us to solve problems before they even exist.
Laudable goals, and in their spirit we’d like to suggest our own ounce for Rideau-Vanier.
Fleury is well placed to fill the prescription because we note that he sits on the City’s transportation committee. So, Councilor Fleury, here it is:
Do something to make measurable progress in making the streets of your ward safer for pedestrians. Your ward has two of the three most dangerous Ottawa intersections for walking safety according to University of Ottawa expert Barry Wellar; as you could likely guess if you didn’t already know, they are the corners of King Edward/Rideau and Mackenzie King Bridge/Colonel By.
It’s a terrible sort of prophecy to make, but unless something is done to make these intersections safer it’s an odd-on bet that sometime over your term in office pedestrians will be seriously hurt or even killed at one or both of these dangerous corners.
As community activists have learned from experience, Ottawa’s traffic engineers seem to have a default position: it is to resist any attempt at making streets crossings safer for walkers. But we’re sure you’ll agree that it’s your job to stick up for your constituents, not the interests of inter-provincial heavy-haulers. There is no better place to start that advocacy than on the streets of King Edward or Colonel By. Those are the places where, if the City fails to take its preventative medicine, the outcome could well be fatal to its citizens.