By Denis Gagnon, Ottawa Citizen Letter to the Editor, January 11, 2014
I am very disappointed by the lack of vision this city has as far as roads are concerned. Anyone local or visiting people travelling the capital from east to west, is astonished by the quality of roads difference between those two areas. Crawling all the way from eastern Ontario, through Rockland with 20,000 people and Cumberland, 12,000, the traveller uses a narrow winding two-lane road that dates back to the 1940s-\'50s.
Reaching Orléans, the road widens to four lanes to accommodate the flow from the east and also the part of the 150,000 Orléans area people working downtown. Just past downtown, the road widens to six lanes and sometimes to eight lanes farther west. Part of this road even has HOV lanes! Then, four wide lanes take you all the way to Arnprior from the intersection of Hwy. 7 and the 417. Two years ago, Hwy. 7 way widened to four wide lanes right up to Carleton Place, population 10,000.