City Hall Fails To Understand Ottawa: BENN

11/18/2024

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Organizations that fail to understand their customers, fail.

This is a concept understood by those who are serially successful. A concept not grasped by those who constantly fail. Understand does not mean pander to every want, every whim. What it means is that the motivations of the users must be understood. If you don’t understand what motivates the users, then you cannot design solutions that either meet their needs or convinces them to adapt to what is being offered. As you contemplate this basic concept, think of city hall, and substitute residents or users for customers.

Over the last decade plus, city hall has lectured its users, the residents and employers of Ottawa. Lectured us on how to get around the city. Lectured us on where we should live. Lectured us on what we should embrace, and what we should reject. Lecturing its users. Does that sound like an organization that understands its users? Does this explain, in part, why the city is failing in so very many ways?

Let’s review this in the context of two higher profile examples.

The Official Plan tells people that they must adapt to smaller spaces inside the Greenbelt. Period. It is based on what the city can support in the way of infrastructure. It is short on explaining how it meets the wants/needs of the city’s users. Why? Because insufficient resources have been directed at understanding what the city’s users want.

What it fails to grasp is that some people need larger spaces. They need room for a family, possibly even three or four generations. That they need to live near where they work, which is not necessarily inside the Greenbelt. They may need to live near family and friends. Near a school for their children. They might need easy access to routes that take them across or out of the city. On the other hand, there are those whose needs are met by smaller spaces in denser neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods that offer most, if not all, the needs and wants of their residents.

That is why the big picture objectives of the Official Plan, notably intensification and densification around major transit hubs will fail. Because it is based on what city staff and councillors want. The actual needs and wants of the users were, and remain, not understood. In fact, the wants and needs of the users, if considered at all, were deemed to be irrelevant. Does this sound like the recipe for success, or failure?

Public transit is failing to meet the needs of the residents and employers of Ottawa. Not an opinion. A fact. Why? Is it within the realm of the possible that the senior nabobs at OC Transpo, at city hall, around the council chamber, do not have a sufficient understanding of why people are not using public transit? Not if you ask those in positions of authority. Rather than put adequate resources into finding out what people need from public transit, we get lectures on how we must embrace OC Transpo. Even if it doesn’t take us where we want, when we want. That is why public transit in Ottawa is a failure and will remain a failure.

Aside from not understanding its customers, another theme is apparent. If you don’t do what we tell you, you will be punished.

In the context of the Official Plan, the punishment takes the form of limiting the supply of housing that meets the wants and needs of some of the residents. Economics 101, within the first month of the first semester. Limit supply, prices with increase. Another basic concept that city staff and councillors have failed to grasp. Yet the city claims that it is concerned about affordable housing.

Public transit. Take the bus or LRT to where it is going, when it is going or sit in your car, staring at the tail lights in front of you, until they disappear over the horizon. Yet the city claims that is worried about the impact on climate change of idling internal combustion engines.

Bottom line. The city’s residents have a wide array of wants and needs. What they value. Some of those users’ wants and needs generally coincide with what the city is prepared to offer. For others, it ranges from not so much to not at all. Until the city directs sufficient resources to understanding what its users value, it will continue to fail to meet the wants and needs of its users. Which is business as usual down at city hall. Because failure is acceptable down at city hall.

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