City Must Think Big, Not Small: BENN

Short-term solutions often create long-term problems which compound over time as more short-term solutions are implemented. Such is Ottawa’s public transit service.

Executives are expected to understand the complexities of the operations of their organization. They are expected to know how each functional area is interwoven with other functional areas. They are expected to know how changes to one element will impact other elements. Executives are expected to know that if they pull on this string that that sleeve will fall off. They are expected to make decisions with the full knowledge of likely outcomes. Decisions that create optimal results based on inter-functional dependencies and existing constraints.

OC Transpo GM Renee Amilcar is facing a lot of criticism for the many failures of public transit in Ottawa. Most recently for the roll out of the New Way to Bus initiative. Some of that criticism is merited but the bulk of the problems OC Transpo faces are the results of current and past city councils’ unwillingness to think beyond the immediate term.

Public transit in Ottawa is failing to provide useful public-transit services for a multitude of reasons.

OC Transpo is running an eight-figure operating deficit in the tens of millions of dollars. That is a constraint imposed in large part by city council. The operating-budget constraint is not new. It has been around for many years. Yet council has failed to address it. Rather, council has opted to support the directives of the mayor, first Jim Watson, then Mark Sutcliffe, to hold the increase in the property-tax rate to politically expedient levels. It has created the dilemma of how OC Transpo is required to do more with less.

Spoiler alert. When you put less into the pot, don’t be surprised when less comes of the pot.

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The challenges public transit is facing are not limited to inadequate funding. Over the course of the last five decades the various entities that were once cities or townships plus the regional government supported the growth of bedroom communities. Bedroom being the operative term. Orleans, Riverside South and Barrhaven are vast areas of bedrooms, but limited employment. The employment in those communities being, for the most part, retail and services directed at the community. Kanata, in contrast, offers both bedrooms and employment opportunities beyond local retail and services.

How did the city address the public transit needs for the residents and employers in these ‘not 15 minute neighbourhoods’? A spoke and hub transit design to take the residents from far away to the city centre. Then Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton Chair Andy Hayden insisted on a series of dedicated bus routes starting/ending at the edge of these vast communities that was closest to the city centre. Little effort was made to create dedicated bus corridors to move people from the ever expanding perimeter.

Which takes us to the root cause of Ottawa’s public transit woes.

The city has a long standing practice of developing official plans in sequence rather than as part of an overall master plan. The Official Plan is developed in a vacuum with the transit and infrastructure plans generated in reaction to the Official Plan. This is in contrast to organizations which are managed by people who understand, see above, how each functional area is integrated with other functional areas. This is not some new ‘best practices’ concept. It has been around for centuries.

Neighbourhoods, which are subsets of the larger communities, are designed in large part by tract-housing property developers, whose motivation is to maximize the use of the land for housing and supporting retail development.  Council, desperate for the resultant development fees, does not insist that city planners tasked with evaluating these plans ensure that public transit corridors are adequately addressed. At the same time, council directs staff to incorporate safe cycling lanes into neighbourhoods, which consume the limited land available for traffic lanes that could otherwise be used exclusively for public transport.

The city is, once again, examining the concept of retrofitting existing major transportation routes, such as Baseline Road and Carling Avenue, for rapid transit corridors. Existing roadways are constrained by residences and plazas built close to the curb. Vehicle routes that are overloaded with vehicles. Not just personal use vehicles but buses and delivery vehicles. Retrofits that take the better part of a decade to complete. Retrofits that will further disrupt public transport.

So, council, as you evaluate the performance of OC Transpo general manager Renee Amilcar, keep a mirror handy. She is being asked to optimize the public transit service around the constraints imposed by councils past and present.  Perhaps what we have today is the best we can ever hope for, given the decades of reacting instead of planning by the city.

It is up to today’s council to decide whether it is prepared to sacrifice the short term, notably its electoral prospects in next year’s municipal elections for the good of the city, by making decisions on long-term solutions to address our long-term problems.

Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.

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