City Ignores People’s Wants And Needs: BENN

Why does it take so long to get from where you are to where you want to get to at a municipal level, not at a metaphysical one?

The City of Ottawa does not appear to believe that it needs to know why people move around the city on a day-to-day basis. It didn’t need to know why people move around the city when it crafted its Master Transportation Plan. No, the plan, the document used to direct hundreds of millions of dollars towards the transportation infrastructure needed to move people and goods around the city, is designed in response to the Official Plan. The Official Plan is the document that tells people where the city wants them to live. The Official Plan is not based on the needs and wants of the residents. It is based on the wants of those who report to work in the city hall ivory tower that is city hall.

Therein lies the problem. A disconnect between the wants and needs of those who live and work in the city and those who are tasked with governing those same people. Rather than planning in response to the needs of the residents of the city, the city plans around the wants of the city. Sound like a plan for success? Or failure?

Successful organizations recognize that their very existence relies on meeting the wants of their customer base. Those organizations understand they need to understand their customers. Those organizations understand they need to study, in an objective manner, the wants and needs of their customer base, and then design solutions that meet those needs and wants. Organizations that understand that without that critical information, that their very existence is at risk. Organizations that behave in this manner are more likely to be successful because they know that they need to know what their customers want and need.

Think Practicality? Think City Of Ottawa

In contrast, organizations that offer what they want to offer and hope their customers accept, are less likely to be successful. The very survival of organizations that rely on strategies that ignore their customer base is often a function of being in a monopolistic setting ,,, like the City of Ottawa.

How can this be corrected?  It starts with a change in culture. An acknowledgement that the city’s plans are destined to fail if the city doesn’t develop a comprehensive understanding of the wants and needs of the residents and employers. A change in attitude that recognizes that the publication of a plan is not the end of the task. A change in the attitude that the actual results need to be compared to the plan, with adjustments made to the plans if the actual results vary materially. In other words, the city needs to change its culture to a customer-oriented organization, even though they are a de facto monopoly.

As it relates to addressing the existing transportation woes, the ever-growing congestion, the city needs to clearly understand where people live (the common feature of the vast majority of day trips), where they go to, why and how often. Not easy, but not so difficult as to be impossible. For example, large volumes of data could be achieved by asking employers to provide the first four digits of the postal codes of their employees (no names, for privacy reasons), along with the same data for the correlated place of employment. Toss in the frequency of the trips based on work requirements.

The city could do this analysis on its own staff to better understand why its 1,600 parking spaces in Centrepointe continue to be filled by city employees throughout the work week when a major transit hub is a couple of hundred metres away. That would provide data sets for analysis from which informed decisions could be made.  If only the city wanted to do that.

To be clear, the decades of failing to plan transportation corridors creates a significant constraint in addressing the current and future congestion on the city’s roadways. Expanding existing routes through existing developments is expensive. Carving new routes through existing development is virtually impossible. Waving a wand won’t repair the decades of damage done by those who have never cared about meeting the actual needs and wants of the residents and employers.

Having said that, there is no time like the present to start making informed decisions. Over to you, councillors. Another challenge for you to undertake to perform your statutory obligation to oversee city staff decisions.

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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