City Hall: It’s Not About You, But Them: BENN

Published 11/09/2024 · Updated 11/09/2024

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Just something to think about as you stare at the endless line of brake lights ahead of you.

Invariably there are consequences for city-hall decisions.

For more than a decade, councils have passed budgets based on politically expedient property-tax-rate increases, increasing grants from senior levels of government and supported by funding major infrastructure projects with low-interest debt. At some point you have to pay for what you bought. Both in cash and consequences.

The impact on the city is not just financial.

The budget is just the dollar-sign manifestation of the operating and capital program decisions. It is based on the operating- and capital-project decisions made by staff and passed routinely by council. Many of those decisions are based on fanciful assumptions. Assumptions that are presented as fact, when they are, at best, theories.

Through a cynical lens, they are based on nothing more than wishful thinking.

One budget consequence is congestion. Wide scale. Induced by a number of concurrent decisions. Decisions with largely predictable consequences. Welcome to our present and our future.

Consider a key element of how people and goods move around a large urban area. They do it in a multi-modal manner … personal- and business-use motor vehicles. Public transit. Bicycles. On foot. There is a concept held firmly by staff and council that the public will embrace public transit. That everyone living near a major transit station will take public transit to get everywhere. That rather than experience congestion from behind the steering wheel, the public will eschew its motor vehicle for public transit. Except public transit does not go everywhere. And where it does go might not be as timely a trip as the alternatives.

The city rightly decided to create a light-rail system as the spine of the public-transit system. Set aside for future discussion was the recurring downtime to perform what is euphemistically referred to as routine maintenance. Set aside the less-than-competent senior management oversight of this multi-billion-dollar project. The reality is that Stage 1 of the LRT was designed to take people from the near east and near west to downtown with a fleet of buses delivering people to and from those points.

Except there was insufficient thought as to how the buses would get to and from the end points. As well, little time spent on how to collect and return the riders living in the outer urban transects and outer suburban areas. The same problem will exist when Stage 2 is complete. It is only the end points that change.

There was insufficient thought about to how to deliver and return, by way of public transit, people to ‘not downtown’. Kanata is a major employment centre. Has been for decades. And it has been totally ignored by decision-makers as if it didn’t exist.

In the meantime, the older, poorly maintained infrastructure, largely as a result of the decades of politically expedient budget decisions in the inner urban areas, needs to be upgraded. This results in excavating roadways used by the fleet of buses, along with the delivery vehicles and cars from those who cannot rely on a poorly designed public transit system. The road construction is undertaken with no sense of urgency and wastes travellers’ time. Not to worry, staff and council are more than willing to lecture you on how your needs must change to meet their wants, with a wagging of the finger that if only you took the bus, all of this would resolve itself.

The bottom line. We are suffering the consequences of the decisions made by councils past and present that were based on the city’s wants rather than the users’ needs.

Decisions that, in many cases, are irreversible.

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