These are my neighbours. These are the people I was elected to represent at City Hall but when it comes to bus service, I haven’t very much moved the needle.
And this failure to offer reliable transit is having another impact. When proposals come forward for transit-oriented development like the new towers in Orleans, or the recently announced project on Baxter Road in College Ward, residents are forgivably skeptical that anyone will choose to choose transit over a car. How can we honestly plan for people to take transit when we can’t offer reliable services?
I considered writing this as an explainer piece. Where I say that we have sunk costs in the LRT, we have sunk costs in procuring E buses, we don’t have the mechanics.
But I’m not going to do that. We have had enough of those.
I’m going to talk about the need for a vision for our city that puts reliable transit at the centre.
You can’t talk about Transit without talking about transportation, and yet at the City of Ottawa, we wring our hands at Transit Committee and then go over to Transportation Committee and talk about balanced investments for roads and cars.
For the average resident, they have no idea that these two committees are separate. We need a vision that actually brings these two together.
Like everyone else, I need to be able to get around Ottawa fast. And driving my car isn’t always the fastest choice.
The 417, due to traffic volumes, construction, and accidents, is a gamble every day. We never know if it will provide a quick drive home in rush hour, or a slow, frustrating crawl through a congested parking lot.
So what’s the solution to congested roads? There’s only one: enticing some commuters out of their cars by offering an affordable, reliable alternative in public transit. Not everyone will choose to bus or train instead of driving, but many will IF they can count on transit to get them to work and school and appointments on time. After all, reading a book or watching videos while someone else does the driving can be a pleasurable experience if you aren’t stressed about being late.
We need more aggressive approaches to moving people around by transit. It must be a viable, reliable option if we want commuters to use it.
That’s the only realistic way to reduce congestion. And we need to be able to say this fearlessly, because when the 417 is one of the slowest roads that you have in the entire city of Ottawa, you know that the problem is that there are just too many cars on the road.
Is it because we’ve put all our eggs in one basket as a solution with the LRT? And starved other parts of our service over the years? Definitely.
Is it because we’ve allowed for individuals to see themselves as exclusively car drivers or exclusively transit users, and let them battle amongst each other? Absolutely.
Is it because Council has allowed the creation of an environment where staff are afraid to tell us what – or how much - they need to make the bus system work? Oh, yes. Getting answers to hard questions is like pulling teeth from a tiger.
Am I being a little inflammatory? Sure. But if I’m going to be held accountable, as I should be, then I at least need to be accountable for the vision that I know will solve the problem.
Here’s what I believe we need in order to fix our bus system:
1. Dedicated bus-only lanes, particularly during peak periods, along with the development of a robust bus rapid transit system like the Baseline BRT;
2. Re-evaluating how many buses we need in the fleet, to cover for maintenance issues and LRT “replacement bus” requirements;
3. Re-establishing the commuter express routes, at least until the LRT east and west extensions are both fully operational and until we can safely run a full complement of trains and cars again;
4. Rejecting development sprawl that forces the City to provide bus services further and further from the urban area.
But Laine, what about the LRT?? Here’s the reality: Council has little to no control over the issues with the wheel assemblies, the tracks, or the catenary system. A previous Council signed away our rights to manage these problems and we are dependent on the contractor to fix them.
Right now, the City is desperately hoping that the Province takes over the LRT, as Doug Ford promised last election. But why would they rush to do so? Why would they take over a broken system with millions of dollars in liabilities? And even if they do, it won’t solve the issues, it will just alleviate the City of Ottawa’s budget vulnerability.
The idea that we can continue to approach this in the middle of the road is a weak political platitude. When we all go to the middle of the road, we get all stuck.
