Green Traveler: Ottawa, Canada

August 17, 2013 -- Canada's clean and friendly capital city of Ottawa, Ontario is green as well. This past summer I took a day trip to Canada's fourth-largest city from Montreal. I rode the Greyhound bus there and took the VIA Rail Canada back to Montreal.

Ottawa is compact and easily walkable, but if you need to get around faster there is a fleet of bicycles to rent that are part of Ottawa's bike sharing system. There are 250 Capital BIXI bikes located at 25 stations in downtown Ottawa and Gatineau, Quebec across the Ottawa River.

There is an excellent bicycle infrastructure in downtown Ottawa with many bike lanes, including separate pathways and green-painted intersections to clearly mark where bikers are passing and turning.

And for those times when walking or biking won't get you to your destination fast enough, there is a bus rapid transit (BRT) system operated by OC Transpo that is one of the most extensive in the world. Wikipedia describes Ottawa's BRT system as follows:

The Transitway is one of the most extensive and successful implementations of bus rapid transit, having begun service in 1983; many of the Transitway roads are above or below the grade of normal streets in Ottawa, by the use of overpasses, bridges, and trench highways. Thus, they rarely intersect directly with the regular traffic, and make it possible for the buses (and emergency vehicles) to continue at full speed even during rush hour. Buses that travel on the Transitway can cross very long distances (especially outside the downtown area) without stopping for a single traffic light. Most sections of the Transitway have a speed limit of 70–90 km/h (43–56 mph) between stations, and 50 km/h (31 mph) in the station areas.

Ottawa is expanding its public transit further with its biggest project yet -- a 7.8 mile light rail transit (LRT) line called Confederation Line that will include three underground subway stops downtown and will open in 2018.

Here are more pictures of Green Ottawa: