Budget transit before shopping

Council must fit plans to available cash

(Saturday, November 24, 2007 by Randall Denley, The Ottawa Citizen) -- Just when a reasonable person would have thought that Ottawa city councillors had written the book on incompetence in transit planning, they have come up with a whole new chapter.

In the latest twist in the never-ending story, they have brought the north-south light-rail plan back, sort of, as well as an east-end transit line that doesn't connect to anything while maintaining their fascination with a downtown tunnel. People in the west will get nothing more than a modestly improved transitway, but at least they will have the consolation of knowing the bus expansion is real. The rest of what councillors recommended this week is pure fantasy. Good thing, too, because it's not much of a plan. It reads as if it were written on the back of an envelope, and not a particularly large one.

One of the many flaws of this week's stunt is that it cuts the public completely out of the loop. No one but the few councillors who crafted this plan knew it was in the works, so the public had no opportunity to offer opinions. Councillor Maria McRae says this high-level guidance from councillors will go into the city's "transportation master plan" and the public can react then. Great, but it's always better to react to something before staff get locked in on it.

Councillors were justifiably dismayed that their staff had proposed a $450-million plan to improve bus transit. To listen to city staff talk, it was as if the last few years had never happened and light rail didn't exist.

Then councillors fell into a time warp of their own and restored north-south light rail as a priority for the city. It was astounding, given that councillors have already ditched a remarkably similar light-rail plan after much discussion and debate. What does it take to get rid of this thing? Councillors say they have to be ready to grab Ottawa's share of a big pot of federal transit money. Even if they don't have a good plan to spend it, apparently. Where have we heard that story before? this new transit plan has more to do with politics than planning. councillors who want the big bus transit spending to go ahead can support it because they will get what they want now. councillors who want to tell their constituents that they have put north-south light rail back on the list are also happy.

The problem is, this new approach fails to lay out a complete and sensible transit system for the city. Nor does it rank the city's transit priorities or establish any methodology for doing so. Despite the talk about positioning the city to get federal money, the concept on the table is so vague and illogical that no sensible federal politician would spend a dime on it.

Here's what council should do. First, establish how much money the city can actually afford to spend on transit expansion. The city will likely have to pay one-third of the cost of any expansion, so we need to figure out what's affordable for Ottawa, then assume we will get equal amounts of money from the federal and provincial governments.

Having established a realistic budget, councillors must then determine how much will be set aside to solve the transit bottleneck downtown. Surely, there is consensus that it's our No. 1 transit problem. When councillors look at their budget and the cost of a tunnel, they might find themselves getting enthusiastic about surface light rail again.

Having earmarked part of the money for solving the downtown problem, councillors should then turn their attention to what improvements are affordable and desirable for the eastern, western and southern suburbs.

Since the major point of all this capital expenditure is to attract more riders, all three suburban solutions should be assessed based on cost and the likelihood of attracting new riders. One of the critical flaws of the old north-south rail plan was that it put a huge amount of money into an area with few potential riders. That's not a good business decision.

These few logical steps will produce a plan that's affordable, ranks priorities logically and will stand up to external scrutiny. Just choosing things for reasons that are purely political and spending $450 million on transitway improvements with no grasp on the overall problem is absolutely the wrong way to go.

This latest $2-billion attempt at a transit plan is so thin it is barely worth criticizing, much less endorsing. Councillors are making this up as they go, actually switching the Cumberland line from rail to simply "transit" during the discussions -- discussions that were terribly rushed, because there had been a snow warning and councillors wanted to make sure they were able to get home without getting their cars stuck.

The city needs a serious transit plan. This little political potpourri isn't it.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007

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