Replacing the Alexandra: Ottawa's new bridge is challenged with the heavy weight of symbolism

Photo: D.Jones

Saturday, January 6, 2024

Alexandra’s replacement can’t just carry cars and trucks across the river, but must work as “a foreground and a background, a sculpture and a setting,” states federal blueprint

OTTAWA CITIZEN, by Randy Boswell

The national capital’s most picturesque crossing of the Ottawa River isn’t scheduled to be dismantled, replaced and reopened until 2032. But members of the federal government team overseeing the planned demolition of the Alexandra Bridge and the erection of the structure that will take its place are likely going to need the full eight years just to meet their own ambitious goals for what the reborn landmark is expected to accomplish symbolically.

How high have they set the bar?

According to the comprehensive overview document guiding the expected $800-million project, the new bridge in the heart of Ottawa-Gatineau will have to bear not only the weight of thousands of trucks, cars and buses as they journey daily across the river, but also the heavy responsibility of commemorative and metaphorical obligations explicitly written into the 477-page blueprint prepared by Public Services and Procurement Canada and the National Capital Commission.

The new bridge, according to the PSPC-NCC integrated project team leading the monumental undertaking, will need to:

1. celebrate the engineering marvel that the original, 122-year-old structure represents;
2. advance the cause of Indigenous reconciliation;
3. include features to commemorate a dark moment in the LGBTQ2+ history of Canada;
4. pay homage to the designated heritage river running below, as well as:
5. the wildlife all around;
6. the shoreline archaeological heritage;
7. the original construction material (i.e. century-old piers and girders);
8. the breathtaking vista;
9. the relationship between Ontario and Quebec;
10. the principle of sustainability;
11. the multiple merits of “active transportation”;
12. and — why not? — the story of Canada itself.

As the project’s official mission statement puts it, the dual aim is “to create a sustainable interprovincial transportation connection that will prioritize active mobility and highlight the symbolic importance of the site to all Canadians for many generations to come.”

David Jeanes, one of Ottawa’s most prominent heritage advocates, is also a sustainable-transportation proponent and a civil engineer by trade. It’d be a challenge to find anyone in the capital who could better articulate an appreciation of the twin challenges facing the bridge builders: to erect a sturdy structure to carry us across the water for the next few hundred years while investing it with the necessary artistry, imagination and sense of history.

Jeanes is a former president of Heritage Ottawa, which promotes the conservation and showcasing of heritage architecture in the city. He’s also on the PSPC-NCC’s public advisory group for the bridge project as a representative of Transport Action Canada, which advocates for sustainable and efficient public transit and improved infrastructure for individuals’ active transportation — cycling, walking and other healthy, carbon-free means of locomotion.

Both organizations are also part of the Alexandra Bridge Coalition, which has led the fight against the demolition of the original crossing.

If Jeanes and the rest of Ottawa’s heritage and environmental communities had their druthers, the existing bridge would be preserved and repurposed — not replaced. The ABC coalition has spent years unsuccessfully trying to convince PSPC and the NCC to keep the current bridge intact, but halt vehicular traffic and convert it to a crossing exclusively for active transportation and public transit — specifically an interprovincial tramway or light-rail line that would represent a fraction of the weight and structural stresses posed by endless streams of cars and trucks and buses.

“The concern on the heritage side,” Jeanes notes, is that much energy is being poured into figuring out how to commemorate the current bridge, “rather than considering the question of, you know, is the bridge worthy of preservation?”

And while Jeanes acknowledges that this battle appears to be lost, he argues that federal officials pushing ahead with the new bridge project have never seriously studied the light-use option favoured by opponents of Alexandra’s replacement. The Alexandra Bridge Coalition insists that because the existing bridge is so little used by cars and trucks (9 per cent of all cross-river vehicular traffic in the capital) and so extensively used by cyclists and pedestrians (about one-third of all cross-river traffic in the capital), the PSPC and NCC have ignored a better solution than replacement.

“That decision was made by them last fall,” Jeanes concedes. “We’re aware, from that point of view, that people would say the train has left the station. But the Alexandra Bridge Coalition and Heritage Ottawa still don’t feel that the alternative . . . has been adequately considered.

“PSPC is convinced that the bridge has to be rebuilt to Canadian highway bridge standards,” adds Jeanes. “And we feel that that’s the wrong criteria.”

David Jeanes is a member of Heritage Ottawa's Board of Directors. Read this article in its entirety on the Ottawa Citizen website.