The Carlington Summit

I noticed the CCA will be asking the new City of Ottawa to remove the street calming speed hill on Merivale next to Westgate Shopping Centre. Now things usually get done by the city or region because some residents asked to something to be done to remedy a situation. The city and the region didn't waste money by taking their own initiative to install something that solves one problem only to create a multitude of other problems! Then you might ask who were the residents wanting the speed bump in the first place??

There are no residential homes on that bit of road. The rumor that I heard was the people who were working or visiting the Royal Ottawa Hospital and did not want to pay for parking at the RO parked at Westgate, but felt threatened by the traffic coming from under the Queensway. Now I'm not saying that this was done intentionally, but it appears to me that the speed bump was installed so people could more safely break a by-law called J-walking. I was interested that a regional consultant report said the speed bump reduced the speed somewhat (how much is somewhat?). Is the speed reduction inversely proportionally to the damage done to the alignment and other parts of automobiles (somewhat)?


As a writer, I'm all too aware of how easy it is for errors to creep into text; and how sentences that seem to make perfect sense may actually be utter *non*sense. But that's not enough for me to stop taking perverse pleasure in these really, really bad headlines sent in by reader Howard H. Hasting, Jr.: