Transit Mess Means Gower Should Resign

“The most powerful social public policy we can offer in our cities and countries is that of the right to mobility… the right to mobility is as basic as the right to health, education, or security.”

Diego Monraz, Department of Transportation in Jalsico, Mexico
as quoted by transit commission chairman Glen Gower

We Ottawans lost one of our rights to mobility on the weekend with the O-Train down a total of seven hours in addition to a planned outage for construction purposes.

Gower is denying us of our mobility rights while praising the rights of mobility.

The O-Train doesn’t work again. Furthermore, six years after the first O-Train outage and six years of derailments and outages, Gower and his team at Ottawa City Hall have driven people away from transit rather than encouraging them. Five years and no root cause for the train’s derailment and its healthy appetite for destroying its own axles. People are so discouraged with the train that they have reverted back to their cars. “Clients” from Barrhaven take four hours of daily commuting by bus and train to get downtown and back. According to one councillor, Gower and company removed 75,000 hours of travel from the bus system through the so-called initiative New Ways To Bus which riders have dubbed “New Ways To Wait.” Multiple traffic jams occur on major roads due to people having lost faith in transit and reverting back to cars.

Oversight? No. Noversight.

Ottawans have lost their right to mobility while Gower waxes on with transit ideology on buses, cars and the very faulty $7-billion O-Train. And oh yes, did we mention the O-Train is already two years late and looks very likely to go beyond that two-year target for completion.

Gower plays his violin (more likely a banjo) while transit burns (actually there’s no evidence that Gower can play the banjo). He pronounces on ideology while transit and transportation practicality suffers. Gower is oblivious to the self-caused transit crisis in this city. Rather than pronouncing on transit ideology, Gower should encourage his minions to find a solution to wheels-on-trains-devouring-axles. Or getting better switches. Or discover why the train power went out. Or conjure a reason for why the massively late O-Train project, the largest municipal project in Ottawa history, can’t be hastened.

Gower cannot get the people who are responsible for maintaining the train to get it to work reliably.

So here’s a way that Gower can stash his mighty grade-school thoughts and take a great leap forward for transit and transportation in this community.

Gower should resign.

With the fiasco that is the O-Train (both its lack of functionality and its $7-billion worth of lateness) and the failed New Ways To Bus initiative, it is obvious that Gower is not up to the job of transit commission chairman.

Maybe the best way to start to fix transit and transportation in this city is to get someone who is practical enough to get the system working and completed promptly. That person is not Gower.

Fewer big thoughts and more action.

Less hypocrisy.

Ken Gray

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