Driving into Ottawa these past several months would have you witnessing the progress being made on the interchange at Highway 17 and the Calabogie Road turnoff. This $25 million operation represents stage 1 of the larger project of expanding Highway 17 from Scheel Drive to Bruce Street, in Horton Township.
Stage 2 of the project will be the actual widening of some 22 kilometres of roadway between Scheel and Bruce, something that has been a dream in this part of the Ottawa Valley for a long time, a dream now coming true right in front of us.
Three more interchanges will round out this expansion, one at Gillan Road, another at O’Brien Road, and a third at Bruce Street.
We’ve seen the growth of Arnprior these past few years, the result of the widening of the highway to that town, and soon to be city. Places just become so much more attractive to business and industry when accessible by a four-lane highway, and Arnprior has been the beneficiary of that as new citizens and businesses grow the municipal tax base.
The same will hold true for Renfrew, perhaps to a lesser degree, as dictated by its proximity to Ottawa relative to Arnprior which is obviously closer. Nevertheless, as the movie title once stated, if you build it they will come.
The Arnprior-Renfrew thing kind of reminds me of the Barrie-Orillia thing just north of Toronto on Highway 400, which at one time was just good-old Highway 11 until expansion. Barrie, the closest of the two to Toronto, went from a community about the size of North Bay (maybe 50,000) to what it is now, some 153,000 strong and still growing. Likewise Orillia, just up the road from Barrie, has grown, to a population of just under 35,000 from the munch smaller town I remember from the 1970’s through to the 1990’s. Toronto is much larger than Ottawa, so there’s a difference in scale, but significant growth is still going to take place in this part of the valley.
I can’t guarantee timelines for completion as highway construction is a time-absorbing endeavour, but as we see the interchange at the Calabogie Road take shape, those of us in Renfrew can be assured that, as that project nears completion, the second stage will follow immediately on its heels, subject to project tendering and developmental work.
Renfrew’s population, in 2016, was listed at 8,223 souls, which is about a dozen more or less of what it’s been for the thirty plus years I’ve lived here. I think it’s safe to say that we, too, are about to experience some meaningful growth, the kind that can have us approaching city status of 15,000 within the next decade or so.
Maybe.
It’s certain that we’ll be linked in to a transportation and communication system, with the Renfrew-Ottawa-Montreal corridor being entirely four lane, with extensions for Quebec City, east to the Maritimes, and south to the U.S. border, all also four lane highways.
For driving, the regional world just got smaller.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 