Why Doesn’t Ottawa City Hall Get It? BENN

Why is city hall populated by so many people who are incapable of understanding cause and effect?

One of the many crises the city has identified is the need for affordable housing. Councillors trip over each other declaring the need for development projects to have affordable housing units. Remember one of the reasons why some councillors were in favour of spending somewhere between $400 million and $500 million on Lansdowne 2.0? To provide more affordable housing units in the Glebe. That’s right. To make a few apartments less expensive to rent, the city is prepared to subsidize the cost of constructing the two residential towers that will rise above the north stands. 

Meanwhile, a small property developer has presented a plan to replace 13 run-down rental units in three nondescript, decrepit buildings in Lower Town, with 24 apartments. The city’s built heritage committee, in conjunction with the planning department, is forcing a builder to add more than $100,000 to the cost bringing it to a level that cannot be recovered. That the people on the built heritage committee, and those that populate the desks in the planning department do not understand the correlation between cost and return on investment boggles the mind.

Were this a one off thing, perhaps we could be more forgiving. But it isn’t.

Traffic congestion is a significant problem in the city. The causes are many: a public transit system that sinks to new lows pretty much every month. Vehicles, including city buses, limping along roads that are pitted with potholes. Potholes that have been patched time and time and time again. Potholes that develop along the seams of roadway restoration efforts that no home owner would accept if they were made to their own driveway. Closure of traffic lanes for months, in some cases years, to facilitate construction projects. Scheduling road construction projects on parallel arterials that handle higher volumes of traffic that cross the city. And what does one downtown councillor want to do? Ban right turns on red traffic lights. All of these add to the lamentable travel time for commuters. 

To further discourage public transit use, the city’s snow clearing policy sets plowing sidewalks as a secondary priority. These sidewalks, that are used by thousands of commuters each day, are cleared of snow, well sort of because seldom is the plow set low enough to make contact with the concrete or asphalt, after the city has scraped down to the green paint the bike lanes, used by cyclists measured in the 10s per day.

Which segues neatly into another of the many emergencies declared by city council. Climate change. Idling vehicles generate greenhouse gases, which contribute to climate change. This is such a major problem that council decided to reduce the length of time a vehicle can idle from five minutes to three. Except if the vehicle is unoccupied, then it becomes one minute. Except city vehicles. At any given time, there are about a dozen buses sitting in Tunney’s Pasture, idling, while their drivers take a much needed break.

Put the last two pieces together. Vehicles stuck in city-induced congestion and city vehicles spewing exhaust fumes. All of which adds to the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

So why can’t the city coordinate its actions with its policy initiatives? How is it that so few people in positions of authority are capable of connecting the dots between cause and effect? It really isn’t rocket science.

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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