Summer 2023 rolled down easy in the land of unemployment. I took the opportunity to give my children the boring summer they didn’t know they needed. We got a puppy, we rode our bikes to the pool at sunset, we filled the garden with rescued perennials from the late July discount aisle, we bought fresh corn from farm stands in parking lots, and we burned hot dogs at Britannia Beach.
A scholar I generally admire tweeted that she was considering leaving Ottawa because she’d “had enough of this pathetic excuse for a city,” reminding me that you should never meet your idols on Twitter. Unfortunately for me, the smallest 4-bedroom home for sale in my neighbourhood is going for $1.3 million, suggesting that more people still choose this pathetic excuse for a city than want to leave it.
What did not roll down easy this summer is the LRT, Ottawa’s light rail system. Routine inspections in early July revealed that a known issue with the train’s wheel bearings was worsening faster than expected. The trains were pulled from service pending further investigation, followed by weeks of media inquiries about rail safety and user confidence. This week, Mayor Sutcliffe and the City’s finance staff revealed a dire financial forecast brought on by low ridership, provincial and federal indifference, and the Increasing Cost of Everything.
By transportation safety standards, Ottawa’s LRT — even with its two derailments — is a safe way to get around. I will spare you my rant about people who decide to use cars because they don’t feel safe on the train. I nearly dislocate an eyeball every time Ottawa residents share their fear of transit while driving their cars into walls, off bridges and over people. At this point, we all know that humans are not rational actors when it comes to cars and statistics.
Ottawa’s transit confidence crisis is not about safety, it’s about not delivering on expectations. The problem is that everyone expects different things.
User confidence is key to a functional transit system. To attract customers, transit needs to take people where they need to be, when they need to be. Within the constraints of time, space, and money, a transit system presents a service offering to riders. The system’s success rests on finding the amount of service that will attract enough customers to be viable. Fares and taxes provide the revenue needed to run the transit network, and the service offering is tailored to this revenue. To offer more service, transit agencies can increase fares, increase taxes, or get more customers on board. Every transit system is like a bespoke suit, made to order. Each transit system reflects the built form, economic engine, demographics and history of the city it was designed for. As Ottawa tries to fit itself into a smaller suit, it needs to have a new look at its service offering and make sure it can still fasten the buttons.
In order to use transit and provide the revenue the system needs, customers have to be able to organize their lives around transit. I live in Stittsville and work as an occasional supply teacher. I do not take teaching tasks in Barrhaven because transit can’t take me there on time in the morning. But when I accept a task, after making sure I can get there, I expect a bus to show up. A transit system that people can trust is a system with built-in resilience, with surge capacity, back up plans, and redundancy. It’s a system that recognizes the cost of being late for work, of missing an exam, of not showing up for a scheduled appointment. Customer confidence is the currency of a viable transit system.
The question of confidence for people who depend on transit is practical, operational. Our expectations are tailored to the service offered. The challenge in a city like Ottawa, where 20% of trips are done by transit, is that we are not only trying to serve people who rely on transit, but also people who have yet to use it. To the residents who don’t use transit at all — or use transit but don’t depend on it — confidence is an undefined target, a feeling.
What does confidence in the transit system mean to a transit user who has access to a faster and more convenient (if more expensive) option such as a car parked in their driveway? What does confidence in the transit system mean to a taxpayer who has no intention of using transit and only sees it as an entry on their tax bill?
Very different things.
In a city built around car dependency like Ottawa, decades of car-friendly policies have made it not only possible to drive everywhere, residents expect it. OC Transpo is in the unenviable position of having to provide reliable service to those who have no other way of getting around while offering drivers a value proposition more enticing than using their personal vehicle. This is the oft-cited “getting people out of their cars.”
Confidence in the system is defined by what the system is expected to provide. But what the system is expected to provide for people who don’t use it is theoretical. It’s in the realm of ideas, of best-case scenarios. People who have yet to leave their cars at home wave their lack of trust in the system like a token, using it as the reason they are still driving everywhere. They use their lack of confidence as the reason they “had to” buy a second or third car, as if privilege and convenience had nothing to do with it. I also “have to” buy a van for my family but that didn’t satisfy the car dealer in the absence of a cheque. OC Transpo stretches itself to offer transit service from estate lots and low density suburban neighbourhoods to downtown, chasing the elusive confidence of potential transit users, while Ottawa’s suburbs remain disconnected from each other.
OC Transpo, with its insistence on « getting people out of their cars,» is feeding the illusion that it can offer people who need a car — anyone who needs to move between suburbs, or on weekends, or late at night, or with any kind of speed and efficiency — a transit service that is somehow more advantageous. We still believe that drivers will give up driving if we give them a big enough carrot. In a city like Ottawa where you can drive 30 km in traffic in roughly the same time you can bus it (90 minutes), where free parking is abundant, where fuel prices are kept artificially low by tax cuts and incentives, and where every family outside the urban core needs a car anyways, OC Transpo has defined the terms of its own confidence crisis. It promises a transit system worthy of leaving your car at home when everyone else is working to protect drivers from inconvenience. Is it surprising that the system fails to meet such impossible expectations?
As OC Transpo enters a budget crisis, it would be well-advised to scale down its aspirational goals and try to meet the real-world needs of those who have to use transit to get around. It’s the only way it can avoid making the confidence crisis more acute as it adapts its operations to its new financial landscape.
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