By FTO member Sean Campeau
For well over a decade, Ottawa’s transit riders have struggled with a system that has gained renown for being among the costliest and most unreliable in the country. The City’s response to the impact of Covid, and the associated growth in working from home, on OC Transpo’s balance sheet has only made things worse. They have regularly increased fares, cut service and made the system even more unreliable by extending the life of many buses well beyond their replacement date. Under these circumstances, growing numbers of those with cars are opting to drive despite the greater costs, creating nightmarish commutes and increasing the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
Given all of this, it’s no wonder that transit has become a hot button issue in local politics and attracted a lot of attention from the candidates for Mayor in the upcoming municipal election. Unfortunately, the leading candidates in the race cannot seem to stake a meaningful position on what to do about the problem, offering minor improvements on one or two issues while ignoring others.
As the first candidate to challenge the incumbent mayor Mark Sutcliffe, and staking a position to his left, one might have expected Councillor Jeff Leiper to set out a bold suite of idea. What he’s offering is: reversing the last round of cuts, increasing the number of new bus lanes, accelerating the Baseline Bus Rapid Transit project and restoring one of the four citizen representatives on the transit system that were dumped by Mayor Sutcliffe in 2022. He has not said how many new buses and lanes he would add, or where, nor how he would accelerate the Baseline BRT which is currently held up awaiting federal matching funds. He hasn’t even promised to freeze fares, let alone do anything to make transit more affordable. This does not offer any grounds to believe that meaningful change might be on the way.
More eye catching is Neil Saravanamuttoo’s promise of ‘A Buck a Ride’ if he’s elected and a pledge to redesign the bus network in part by pulling buses from “underused” routes to shore up priority corridors. This reasoning was behind New Ways to Bus too, and it fails to examine why routes are underused to begin with or explore how we get cars off the road by offering suburbanites transit they actually want to use. Neil proposes a real estate development agency to monetize land around transit stations to raise revenue for the service, which is certainly novel but seems to be avoiding the main issue that transit is being starved of proper funding due to tax increases below the rate of inflation while the City spends $50M a year on transportation “priorities” like road widening for cars.
As the incumbent, Mayor Sutcliffe has had a full term in office to “fix transit” as his 2022 campaign slogan promised us. However, transit wouldn’t be such an issue in the present campaign if he’d made any progress. It is, in fact, worse now. Fares remain among the highest fares in Canada, transit’s unreliability is notorious, New Ways to Bus has made getting from A to B even more time consuming and the LRT expansions remain well behind schedule.
Nonetheless, Mayor Sutcliffe is running on his record and the promise of a substantially discounted adult monthly pass – $95/month, a 30% price reduction. The ensuing flood of new transit riders he claims will more than offset the decline in revenue and enable OC Transpo to expand the transit fleet and improve services. Any reduction in fares is to be welcomed, but it is not those commuting to and from jobs in the City core who are most in need of lower fares. That dubious honour goes to those aren’t able to afford a monthly pass: poorly paid part-time and shift workers, people on social assistance, recent immigrants and seniors. And the greatest need for improved service surely goes to those who depend on ParaTranspo.
Moreover, it must be noted that all these improvements are far from certain to materialize. The reduction to monthly passes is conditional on the Province uploading the cost of the LRT to the Metrolinx corporation, but this deal is not closed and there is no clear date by which it will be reached. And even if it is, there are good reasons to doubt that the growth in ridership and the associated increase in revenue with which to improve services will come to pass. The Mayor’s plan assumes that workers who drive to work, paying hundreds of dollars in gas and parking are just $40 dollars away from trading a 2 hour round trip for a 3-hour one on buses that may or may not get them to work and home on time. The mayor also pledges to advance a slate of bus lane projects but if these weren’t a priority for the last four years, why will the next be any different?
Stepping back a bit, the most striking characteristic of the transit platforms on offer in the upcoming election is the enormous gap between what is on offer and what is needed to address the shortcomings of public transit in our City. If the gorilla in the room is the lack of any clear vision of what good transit means for Ottawa, the elephant in the room is the climate emergency. Good transit is good climate policy. And good transit policy requires more than a ‘commuter system’ that gets people to and from work in the core of a city. It requires a transportation system that prioritizes public (and active) transportation over one that relies on the private automobile. A transit system that moves people around the city reliably reduces the emissions and pollution directly from transportation. It reduces demands for more road and parking infrastructure further reducing emissions, increasing carbon-sinking green space, and enabling more livable city planning. And, it reduces the enormous costs (now more than $16,000 annually in Ontario) of having to own a car in order to access the city. A vision of good transit inspires better urban planning and development that will bolster the city’s resilience in the face of ever-increasing rates of heat waves, ice storms, derechos, and other weather disasters.
Transit has been a high-priority issue for voters throughout this election because the unreliable, unaffordable system that we have is not the mass transit system that we need now or in the future as Ottawa continues to grow in the face of worsening climate conditions. The candidates all agree on improving the transit system is a but they do not offer a vision of the transit system we need. Such a vision would make public transit a priority. It would acknowledge the need to increase and reallocate city spending from places like the road widening budget, plus identifying new funding and revenue sources. It would call for more buses, not just renewing the already-too-small bus fleet. It would prioritize buses lanes on major roads to get buses out of traffic. It would recognize that the Mayor and Council need to lead the city towards such a vision, but that we also need transit riders and operators to be directly involved in the design of that transit system as well.
Our task during and after this election, is to find new ways to work towards making such a vision into our reality.