The Evolution Of Human Transportation In Ottawa

Few things in this city can be more ominous than the words transportation master plan.

When a new one comes along, we get to hear the mayor and councillors wax on about the virtues of active transportation, clean transportation and fast transportation.

But the reality is much different. Progress in transportation in this city is non-existent. We’re going backwards in transportation at an alarming rate.

We have a light-rail system that doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in the cold, in the rain, in the heat, in the ice and sometimes it doesn’t work because it just doesn’t work. Light rail is like a cat. Not exactly sure what it is doing but has a mind of its own.

Our entire city’s transportation system is based on funnelling commuters on a rail line that doesn’t work. The only thing that the Confederation Line has accomplished is force people, who would like to get to work on time, into pollution-spewing used cars. Well done. Does Ottawa have a mass transportation system that contributes to pollution and global warming? Yes. And we paid billions of dollars to accomplish this. Is it possible to be any more incompetent? Yes again. It’s also unsafe.

That, of course, sends the bus system into dog’s breakfast of delays and no-shows and drops people off at LRT stations that aren’t prepared for the throngs of people who converge on them … or at least did. Our mass transit system, post-Covid, runs at about 60 per cent of the ridership pre-Covid and that, combined with work-at-home in an information society, means a total rethink of public transportation. Unfortunately, OC Transpo believes that transit’s salvation resides in a snappy little advertising campaign.

How Do We Fix Ottawa’s Light Rail? BENN

But the fiscal and environmental disasters in Ottawa just magnify themselves. We build even more light rail using a system that doesn’t work at the cost of billions of dollars. And it is monstrously late. The western portion of our exulted light-rail system is expected to be completed in 2026. Will the world still have mass transit in 2026? We shall see.

But there’s more.

Our city, with virtually no debate (it has been orchestrated out of important civic public policy … hello Lansdowne), purchased a fleet of electric buses that-city-after-cold-weather-city say don’t work in winter. You know, the battery poops out in cold weather. Any person who has parked their car outside at -30 C can tell you that. But perhaps these buses are special. In the same way that people, designing our transportation system devoid of common sense or success, are special. Yes our transportation system is special.

A non-functioning bus system along with a non-functioning light-rail system will force people back into their cars which, in turn, will adversely affect the bus system. The traffic system is being strangled by volume and the appalling shape of Ottawa’s roads. This city can’t fill a pothole. The buses use those same roads.

The missing link in our transportation system, according to our municipal commuting scientists, is cycling. We just don’t have enough cycling lanes, no doubt particularly in bad cycling weather which is about two-third of the year. People cycling on a windy, blizzard-like day in Ottawa need counselling. Yet somehow in the ideological bible of transportation experts, cycling is the answer. Halleluiah. For God’s sake, get real. Our city staffers plan cycling as though Ottawa were in Virginia, not near the realm of the subarctic.

Secret City Cycling Plans Include New Bike

All the while that this fumbling of transportation has been occurring, cars are becoming cleaner and evolving into power by electricity and hydrogen. The real progress, most certainly in the Ottawa example, of improving the world’s climate is in the field of automobiles. Auto companies, spurred on by government, know they are a major cause of climate change and pollution. They’re changing. Meanwhile, Ottawa public transit is devolving.

So let’s see how all this falls in the Ottawa example. Light rail doesn’t work. The buses won’t work. This missing link of cycling doesn’t work. Cars don’t work. The sidewalks work, when they aren’t falling apart or covered in ice and snow.

If this is how we measure transportation in Ottawa, we’ve failed miserably.

Pity the poor professors in anthropology and archeology who have spent decades looking for the missing link in human evolution. They’re soon to be out of work. No need to trudge the jungles of Africa or the plains of Asia in search of the missing link.

No, we have found it. The missing link in the transportation realm is here in Ottawa.

It’s on Laurier Avenue at city hall.

Ken Gray

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