Pie Palace

Blake Batson has said on his blog that he wants to “float ideas on how to improve our system that others will be free to vet or claim them as their own.” In that spirit, I’d like to present my first suggestion for our pals in the City of Ottawa: intensification.

Our city was supposed to be squeezed into the Greenbelt. But since this 60s, development has occurred outside the Greenbelt and our city has been surrounded by a fluffy pink tutu of sprawl. Looking at a Statistics Canada map of population density around Ottawa, we see that the population per square kilometre is mostly in the 500-2999 person range. Only in the core does the population rise beyond 5000 ppl/km². Worryingly, looking at the population change map between 2001 and 2006, we see that the population outside the Greenbelt is growing quickly, while the population in the no man’s land between exurbia and downtown is shrinking.

Given the received wisdom that city services (water delivery, sewage disposal, transit) work best in dense urban areas, Ottawa should be looking to the orange areas on that map to lower their cost per taxpayer.

Happily, I’m not the only person suggesting this. The transit experts hired by the city to evaluate our transit plan said the same thing: our suburbs need higher densities to make rail transit a viable option. In a surprising moment of lucidity, the city’s own transportation committee endorsed the idea of improving density along the new light rail route.

Our current transportation plan isn’t very different from what we have today. Hopefully, if City council can keep focused on building a more urban city, we can look at a much better transit scenario in 2031.

Thanks to Blake Batson for the idea of this series.

Ottawa is a world-class city and deserves a transit system worthy of that status – together we’re getting it right.

For some reason, Mayor Larry likes to keep saying Ottawa is a “world-class” city. Then again, he also liked to say that “zero means zero” (or is that 4.9?).

I suspect it will be a few more generations, a few city-wide fires, and a revolution or two until Ottawa becomes a world-class city to rival Paris. We don’t have the boulevards, landmarks, or public transit system to rival the French capitol.

About the only place we can hope to compete is with our on-street food vendors. We have two advantages: our culture accepts eating while walking and we have a large francophone population. It’s only a matter of time before some bright lad or lass at Algonquin discovers that crepes can be made and sold on the street.

“Oh! But what about beaver tails?” you say. The answer to that is simple: savory crepes. Do beaver tails have ham, tomato, feta? No. What about cheese? No. Beaver tails are a culinary dead-end. Crepes are like prokaryotes. There isn’t a gastronomic niche crepes can’t handle. Bring on a Canadian school of crepes, I say.

Sure, our city is a sprawling mess. Sure, our future transit plans are pretty much what we have now (with a little more tunnel). Sure, our city has few landmarks almost no public art. Sure, we don’t have much in the way of urban parks. But we can at least have some decent street food, dammit!

You haven’t lived until you’ve been on an OC Transpo bus as it fishtails around corner after corner after corner.

Ottawa’s been buried under 30 centimeters of snow this weekend, with the possibility of more on the way. I live downtown and things weren’t bad: side streets were buried, but the main roads and sidewalks had been cleared. Busy stretches of sidewalk that weren’t cleared were quickly trampled into a walkable state. Wandering down Bank Street this afternoon the it seemed like an ordinary Sunday: stores were open, people were walking to and fro with their coffee, groceries, and other sundry goods. When you’re walking, a foot of snow isn’t a problem (unless you have mobility problems).

Then I hopped on a bus and headed to the ‘burbs, and witnessed a completely different story. Only the main roads had been plowed. Sidewalks were doubly buried – first under mountains of snow that had been pushed off the roads, then under a dumping of natural snow. The only way to get around was to walk on the road. Fortunately most drivers were polite enough to give pedestrians a wide berth.

I won’t say there’s a moral to this story. Those living in the ‘burbs are used to getting around by car, so after digging out their vehicles, it was probably an ordinary Sunday for them as well. But it seemed pretty clear that squeezing people into walkable neighbourhoods lessened the load on city snow clearing infrastructure.

Image by preciouskhyatt.

According to the OC Transpo website, there are 89.6 million passenger trips on OC Transpo every year¹. Meanwhile, OC Transpo has an annual budget of $266 million.

So let’s whip out the ol’ calculator:

   $266,000,000 / 89,600,000 trips = $2.97/trip

Using those numbers, gleaned from the OC Transpo website, we see that each trip costs about $3. Which is much less than the $6.50 mentioned elsewhere.

Curious about the breakdown of ridership?

• 37.6% of revenue comes from regular, ecopass, and express passes
  
• 22.1% of revenue comes from students
  
• 2.2% of revenue comes from seniors
  
• 36.7% of revenue comes from cash and tickets (ie, we can’t make a guess about the demographic of the rider)

Those demographics are clearly understated. A third of OC Transpo’s revenue comes from cash and tickets, which may be used by students or seniors, or “other”.

Hmm. I’d like to get ahold of historical numbers for fare costs. It’d be fun to graph against tax rates.

1. The OC Transpo website says 89.6 million passengers. If we multiply the number of weekday riders by 260 weekdays per year, we get 90 million, which seems to corroborate the number of trips. (back)