Two weeks ago, I attended an OC Transpo bus route review open house. Before we get to it, I would like to take a minute to re-introduce myself since this newsletter’s readership has grown to include people whose email addresses I don’t recognize.
My name is Véronique and you can read my third-person autobiography here. I started this newsletter after I lost my job at Ottawa City Hall in 2022. I worked four years in municipal politics in Ottawa: two years in the office of Glen Gower (who is now my life partner) and two years in the office of Catherine Kitts. I am a mother of 9 children, some of them with special needs. I have been fired twice in the last 10 months for reasons related to my personal life and family obligations. I have strong feelings about sexism, ageism, and empathy fatigue in the workplace and I sometimes use this newsletter to publish reflections on those topics. I am currently “between jobs”, which is the polite word for “unemployed”. I do not own a car, which gives me an unusual perspective on the suburbs where I live. I try to publish 2 or 3 posts a month on this newsletter and your paid contributions are gratefully received although these posts are available for free. I also publish a newsletter about parenting and recovery after divorce called Hey Véro! Here is a button to the Zoned Out subscription page should you wish to send a few dollars my way in support of this work:
As I wrote above, two weeks ago I attended an OC Transpo bus route review open house at the Nepean Sportsplex. Attendees joined round tables where a note taker and a moderator led the discussions. The round table discussion went well. OC Transpo staff was well-prepared and engaging and the attendees were politely animated. Since I was accompanying the Chair of the Transit Commission, I brought my knitting hoping it would help me keep my opinions to myself. As a woman and former political staffer, keeping your opinions to yourself in public is a lesson that you learn early and often. It worked until the topic of suitable walking distance to a bus stop came up.
An older couple was making a pitch for the elimination of a bus loop through their neighbourhood. Realizing that removing the loop would make the nearest bus stop 1.3 km from the farthest residences in the loop, the couple made a case for changing OC Transpo’s maximum walking distance policies to lengthen the maximum walking distance from 800 m to 2 km, effectively taking transit out of their neighbourhood altogether.
They suggested that since all sorts of health organizations recommend at least 30 minutes of exercise a day, OC Transpo could increase their walking distance policies to 2 km, which would amount to a 30-minute walk to the nearest bus stop. «Since people don’t want to walk 30 minutes a day, OC could have policies to force them!» they helpfully offered. How thoughtful. The idea that people may be walking to transit to get somewhere in a timely manner, sometimes with children or a mobility challenge, never crossed their minds. « An 800 m walk with young children can take 30 minutes and is plenty of exercise, physically and mentally » I opined from behind my knitting bag. There is a lot to unpack here.
Walking is an interesting reference point for all matters of equity and inclusion. It offers a powerful x-ray into the motivations, principles and values underlying a city’s land use and transportation planning policies. From the onset, there is a value judgment that determines if walking is a good thing or a bad thing. In a city like Montreal, where walking is seen as a legitimate way to get somewhere, city amenities and services are planned with walkability in mind. In a city like Ottawa, built around the so-called freedom of car dependence, walking is seen as a planning failure. When people oppose planning applications because they do not offer enough parking, what they mean is that they may have to park their cars farther from their destination and walk. We also make a judgment on the value of walking when sidewalks end abruptly, are kept in poor state of repair, or are never planned in the first place.
In Ottawa, a city of national landmarks and world-renowned green spaces, certain types of walking associated with leisure, tourism and fitness are considered good. But once you leave the parkways and pathways, every day walking to school, work, and transit is considered something to be avoided. This value judgment (good walking versus bad walking) is evidenced by where we put our money. Ottawa has a lot of good policies about active transportation that stand completely at odds with its funding and spending policies.
Take my neighbourhood for instance. There are three planned pathways and one crosswalk on paper linking my neighbourhood the a nearby collector road where three schools and two transit routes are located. My children’s school is a 2 km drive and a 800 m walk from our home. I was able to drive my kids to school from day 1, but 3 years in and the three pedestrian connections and the crosswalk remain unfinished. We are still using a cow’s path that is treacherous in winter and dangerous at night to walk to school and transit. The cow’s path throws us on a collector road with no safe way to cross. We have our priorities right on paper, but they fall apart at the execution stage.
The kind of walking that you “have to do” — walking to work, walking to school, walking to the grocery store, or walking to transit — stands in stark contrast with the kind of walking we want to do. New suburban neighbourhoods like mine are built with world class pathways and sidewalks to walk the dog or get to the park with the kids from May to November. Stormwater ponds are landscaped with naturalized areas, viewing stations and benches for the enjoyment of residents. This wouldn’t be a problem if leisure walking amenities didn’t compete with other kinds of walking — to work, school, or groceries — for limited resources. When we optimize our walking links for leisure walking over walking to get somewhere, we end up prioritizing circuitous routes around neighbourhoods and through parks and not maintaining them when the weather turns ugly. People like me, who have to walk to school and transit, need the shortest route between A and B to be lit at night and maintained in the winter. It demands thinking like someone who doesn’t have the option to take the car. And that’s a tough ask in a city like Ottawa.
The value judgment about the undesirability of walking is not a deliberate policy decision but the accumulation of decisions over time. When car-users make all the decisions — either as voters, elected officials, or managers — the city starts to look like a place where you can take the wife on a pleasant stroll after supper but you can’t get to work on time or to school in one piece unless you drive.
At the transit route review, the moderators asked « what is an acceptable walk to transit? » and the reality is that all walks are not created equal. The measurable length of a walk in meters matters very little compared to the « felt » length of a walk. And the felt length of a walk depends on its environment, the weather, the walking surface, who you are walking with, and what’s waiting for you at your destination. If the walk is not safe for women and children, if it’s not well-lit at night, if it’s not paved, if it’s not plowed, if it’s not accessible to mobility aids including strollers, and if I’m not sure if a bus is going to be there when I show up, then my tolerance for walking will be very limited.
OC Transpo’s bus route review needs to start where every transit rider starts: on foot.