Elgin Street to reopen to traffic in December: City of Ottawa

In a memo sent to council on Wednesday, the city’s director of infrastructure services Alain Gonthier says Elgin Street is set to reopen to two-way traffic after being closed for almost a year for renewal.

According to the memo, the road is set to reopen on Monday, Dec. 16 to all traffic. This includes OC Transpo bus routes 5, 14 and 114, which were detoured during the construction.

The road was closed to all traffic last January to facilitate a long-awaited renewal of the historic downtown street.

The project will resume in early 2020 and the road will remain open. Utility upgrades, including underground connections to properties and the removal of the existing wooden hydro poles along the west side of Elgin Street, are also part of the continued project.

“This will be followed by landscaping, sidewalks, streetlights, public art installation and top lift of asphalt, so that all construction will be complete by the end of the 2020 construction season, as planned,” wrote Gonthier in the memo.

Gonthier also says a motion will be introduced at council asking to extend the free parking program into the 2020 construction season as there will still be significant impacts on the accessibility of the businesses in the area.

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More details on the plan for the 2020 construction season will be released in the lead-up to it.

The memo goes on to reference several other major construction projects in the city, including the widening of Strandherd Drive between Maravista Drive and Jockvale Road in Barrhaven and the renewal of Rideau Street, the former beginning by 2023 and the latter being completed by the end of 2020.