Unpacking the Great Trucking Debate

A hat tip to OpenFile Ottawa for digging up the "2007 Interprovincial Roadside Truck Survey". OpenFile's key takeway from the report was:

• 55 percent of these trucks started and ended their trips within the National Capital Region
• 39 percent started or ended their trips within the NCR
• Only 6 percent made "through" trips where neither their start nor end points were within the NCR.

Reading through the report there a key graphic that illustrates why solving the heavy truck problem downtown won't be simple. The study tracked source and destination and created this "desire line" graphic. It shows where most trucks want to get to/from in the region in a "as the crow flies" fashion.

My take aways from that graphic are:

• Britannia and points west of downtown: safe! No bridge for you.
• What the heck is in AltaVista generating all that truck traffic?

Those desire lines exist because the only bridges that allowed heavy trucks are downtown. A new bridge would eventually change them, but until those businesses and distribution nodes move trucks are still going to "desire" a downtown truck crossing.

Unless a new bridge results in a ban of truck traffic on the existing ones, trucks are still going to use King Edward and Dalhousie.

Perhaps that's why we haven't seen any action on this problem for decades.