Pie Palace

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.

So what would make a good transit plan? I’m not an urban planner, but I can make a few ill-informed guesses:

1. The plan shouldn’t be based on streeters that ask people what they think of their current transit system – that model is too easily biased. Instead, they should do a survey of where people actually go. Ask them for their home and work/school addresses, for example. Build a map that shows where people go and when, then build transit to service their needs, not what you think they may want.
2. The plan shouldn’t just have a “vision”, it should also explain how the goal will be met. The existing plan states that they want to see 30% – in 2001, it was around 16%¹, but they provide no indication of how those goals will be achieved.
3. Include city growth as part of the plan. Ottawa is all crawling with new condos downtown and new subdivisions in the ‘burbs. The plan should serve existing population centres and plan for new growth.
4. The transit plan should include zoning amendments to encourage growth and in-fill around transit lines. The old 2020 plan alluded to that, but the new napkin sketch doesn’t even raise the possibility.
5. The plan should provide a basic breakdown of costs. We’re told that laying track from Baseline station to Blair, and from the Rideau Centre past the airport is only $660 million more expensive than upgrading the transitway? And that a fleet of a few dozen trains won’t cost much more to buy than the 690 buses that OC Transpo runs? That may be true, but it’s hard to believe without knowing where the numbers came from.

The proposed plan is fine – if we want to pay around three billion dollars to get the same service we have today.

1. The site says
   

   It is estimated that in 2001, about 250,000 person-trips were made in a typical weekday afternoon peak hour. Of these, about 74% were by automobile, 15% by transit, almost 10% by walking and just under 2% by cycling

   If we add up the automotive trips, then divide by total number of bus trips, we get 16.67%. (back)

As others have mentioned, the City of Ottawa has put together four possible plans for public transit in 2031. The four plans cover the same ground, they

• follow the current east/west arterials running parallel to the Ottawa river;
• head south as far as Bowesville and Barrhaven Town Centre;
• go north into Gatineau;
• feature a tunnel though the downtown.

The only difference is the mode: the first plan is entirely bus, with each of the other three plans phasing in gradually more light rail. Plan four has the most track, featuring rail lines from the current Baseline station to Blair with a dogleg down to Bowesville and the airport.

If I sound unexcited about the plans, it’s because they’re all pretty much the same. Swap tracks for Transitway, and add a few percentage points of capitol and ongoing costs, and they’re basically the same plan: what we have now. Even the growth projections for transit trips downtown are ho-hum: they project an overall rise of transit use (heading into the downtown core) of 10%.

Tomorrow: suggestions for what a transit plan should include.

Centretowners will have noticed “swap boxes” cropping up around town recently. I don’t know who puts them up, but they’re kind of fun. I have yet to find anything of interest in them, but I always look (and I usually try to leave something).

Most of the ones that I’ve seen have just been fun (and occasionally anti-consumerist). The most recent (seen outside of Invisible Cinema, and across from Venus Envy) took a decidedly political bent. It’s the “Mayor Larry Budget Edition (Running Ottawa Like a Business – Nortel!)“, with “Mayor Larry swapped libraries for a tax freeze. What’ll you swap?” painted on the side.

The piece de resistance has to be the “Ye Olde Apothecary” installed outside of Section off of Bank Street (across from the inappropriately located Telus building). It featured a series of vials in a case, with captions painted in the background “to attract a mate… essence of mayoral swagger“, “for virility, cat scrotum“, and “for charm, pompousness and obscurity harvested from local hipsters.” By the time I got to it (about a week after I first saw it), the front had been smashed in and the vials were gone.

Buried on page 13 of today’s Citizen is a short story mentioning that city Council approved a 9.3% increase in the police budget. Ouch! That’s $17.3 million.

Since 2001, the Ottawa Police budget has increased by 64%. SIXTY FOUR PERCENT! Has crime fallen by a similar amount? No. Are there 64% more cops walking the streets? No. There are 11% more cops.

Where has the money gone? Why does the city keep shoveling money into this pit?

It’s a bad sign that I’m getting my local news from the blogotubes, but I couldn’t resist posting a link to a bit of investigative journalism done by the folks at Miss Vicky’s Offhand Remarks.

In a nutshell: the city (at Larry O’Brien’s bidding) paid a consultant $80,000 to help develop the city budget. Part of that budget mentioned outsourcing parking meter management as a cost-saving measure, pointing to the success of Hamilton’s parking meter outsourcing. Miss Vicky and the Webgeek did some Googling, and discovered that:

• Hamilton handles its own parking meters, thank you very much
  
• Dundas, which recently amalgamated with Hamilton, did contract out their parking meter management, but now wants to reincorporate the service back into their city. The goal is to increase profit being seen in the old municipality of Dundas.

The comments contain an interesting back-and-forth between Blake Batson and the purveyors of Miss Vicky’s on whether outsourcing of a profitable really service is a good idea. Reasons to outsource: a private company has a stronger profit motive than government, so it should be able to be more efficient (ie, a greater return without charging the public more). Reasons not to oursource: the tender process is expensive, and the city will eventually realize that it can be as profitable as the private company and it will reintegrate the service anyway.

Of course, when you factor in that we’re dealing with a finite amount of profit, the silent costs of outsourcing add up: paying off employees who are let go, legal fees for tender and reacquisition, costs of studies to ensure that the private organization is doing a decent job, cost of interacting with the outsourcing firm, et cetera. The devil is in the details.