Crawling nowhere expensively
All aboard the punishing proletarian chariot.
Wouldn’t you like to know who leaked the existence of the memo from Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia and Deputy Clerk Isabelle Mondou expressing concerns about the ability of Ottawa’s beleaguered transit system to handle the flood of civil servants being mandated back to the office in July.
Me, too.
“The bus network is the primary source of frustration for commuters, consistently failing to meet its performance targets,” it reads. The feds have been meeting with the mayor and other transit mucky-mucks for months, trying to find a solution that works. Everyone is making encouraging noises, which is a sure sign of a catastrophic shit show this summer.
Unsurprisingly, transit is emerging as a key issue early in the race for Ottawa mayor. The three declared candidates (Jeff Leiper, Neil Saravanamuttoo and Alex Lawson) have all made various commitments to improve it, from buck-a-ride promises to money-back guarantees. Incumbent mayor Mark Sutcliffe, who is apparently unable to fill out the requisite paperwork in normal times like everyone else, is campaigning on the public dime and promising a 10-point plan to improve service for riders. It’s actually four key areas of focus — make service more reliable, put customers first, strengthen financial stability and build a sustainable workforce. You’d think this was a brand-new transit system. What do you mean — we are just now going to prioritize reliability and customers, after being in office for four years? Are you fucking kidding me?
I don’t care how many times Sutcliffe says he’s frustrated by his own transit system’s unreliability. He’s the guy in office and he hasn’t fixed a thing. Matter of fact, transit in this city is worse now than it was four years ago. At least four years ago we had LRT trains that were longer than one car and more frequent than every nine minutes or whatever risible lack of standard we’re stuck with now.
You can watch the announcement on YouTube, in case you’re having trouble getting angry on your own.
I had coffee with Sutcliffe last fall and one of the things I said, in case he was thinking of running to keep his job this year, was to focus on three things: transport, transport and transport. Without a transit system that people can rely on, they’ll drive. The less reliable the transit system, the more cars on the road. And with the endless and numerous (to say nothing of atrociously badly coordinated) construction projects adding new and longer delays, and trucks just trying to get through to the other side of town since we ain’t got no ring roads, what do you have? A parking lot on the Queensway. Everyone is cranky because everyone is taking way longer than they should getting to where they’re going. Their time is as valuable as the mayor’s and they hate wasting it as much as he does.
If you don’t fix mobility before you announce your intention to run again, I remember telling him, you’ll face a lot of resistance. And that’s with the natural advantages that incumbency brings. He reacted by telling me of historic investments in transit, which are fantastic and great except when they don’t translate into improvements.
Well. Not to make myself out to be a brilliant political strategist or whatever, but this opinion poll that just came out shows how right I was. Sutcliffe is enjoying a small lead with 37% voter intentions against 32% for Leiper, 14% for Lawson and 14% for councillor Tim Tierney who has not said he’s running for mayor (but he might!) while Saravanamuttoo’s buck-a-ride promise is only fetching up support from 5% of voters.
Leiper’s plan for transit strikes me as the one focused on the right thing, which is reliability by undoing service cuts. He is likely betting that people won’t mind paying for transit if it works. “If we want people to choose transit,” Leiper wrote, “we have to give them a system worth choosing.”
We have smart people in this city, and lots of financial resources. We have absolutely no excuse for how shitty our transit system is. I would love a system as wonderful as the Paris Métro or the London Tube. We may never get anything quite this good here. But we can get close.
Until we do, we have no business demanding anyone commute for work if they can do their job from home. It’s that simple.