Kettle Island Recommended as East End Bridge Location

Post date: May 21, 2013 8:46:12 PM

On May 14th 2013, the NCC announced the decision of their "Evaluation Committee" regarding the "technically preferred corridor" for a new interprovincial bridge in the east end of the NCR. The choice was Kettle Island (via Aviation Parkway-Montee Paiement). Kettle Island was preferred over 2 other corridors under consideration, both of which were located further east. This is basically a re-confirmation of the Phase 1 study which also recommended Kettle Island in 2008. Previous studies in the 1990's had also arrived at similar conclusions.

The CCC was present at all stages of the study and attended the May 14th announcement to the public consultation group which consisted mostly of representatives of community groups that were adjacent to the 3 different east end corridors under evaluation.

Reaction was swift with local politicians at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels for the affected area all declaring that they would not support a bridge at Kettle Island. Reasons given included that these areas were too built up as residential areas to be appropriate for such a corridor and that the proposed bridge was not providing an adequate solution to the volumes of inter-provincial trucks in the downtown.

The detailed evaluation report which explains the decision making process used to demonstrate why the Kettle I. corridor is the best route is presented in this Final Evaluation Report. The evaluation scored all of the corridors with a weighted evaluation of factors such as transportation, social, cultural, environmental, land-use, cost and economic spin-off effect. The study claimed that even if the weighting factors were varied significantly more towards measuring social and environmental effect that Kettle Island would still score consistently better than the other corridors.

The proposed project costs were updated as 1.1B$. This cost is composed of approximately 50% bridge costs, 25% new road work on the approaches to the bridge and 25% for engineering and contingency. The proposed bridge consists of 2 traffic and 1 dedicated transit lane in each direction. The roadway approaches on both the Ottawa and Gatineau side need to be modified and widened, significant interchange modifications required at the 417 and 50 interchanges, and overpasses would be built when the corridor crosses over Ogilvy Road on the Ottawa side and Blvd Maloney on the Quebec side.

A more detailed report can be found on our Interprovincial Crossings Details page,