Mike Powell Fanclub

For the - what is it now fifth? sixth? eleventh? I’ve lost count - time in a year, the city seems to have a new transit plan. The mothercorp has a run down here. For those that like to read Council committee minutes, you can find them here.
First, the good:

1. At least people are talking sense and moving forward with some form of light rail. This will likely change the question I was planning toasking on Monday at the budget consultation meeting at Lansdowne park (”How much of a tax increase will it be when we have to pay Siemens $300 million dollars?”)
2. There seems to be a bunch of councillors that approve it, as well as the Mayor and the City Manager. It’s nice to know that they can stop the feudin’ and a fightin’, even if just for a little bit.

And the bad:

1. They still have the tunnel on the proposal, which is absolutely unbelievable. This is a city in the midst of seriously considering shutting down 10 libraries and as much as doubling some user fees, and yet there is still serious consideration that we should all but double the cost of our transit megaplan to build a tunnel under the city. And for what? So that we won’t have to wait for - at maximum - 5 minutes in the cold? So that there won’t be trains dropping people off right in front of storefronts? Please. Let’s also remember that, for the period of construction aside, dedicated light rail corridors certainly couldn’t make congestion on Albert and Slater worse, and also remember that if we make it too easy for people to drive downtown one of the big incentives to actually ride the train is removed. Let me also point out (again) that things have been doing just fine with a principle downtown artery blocked to vehicles for the past month.
2. I am more than a little reluctant that the new route is one that comes from a developer, and not by way of several years of concerted study as to where the route should be. Maybe it still makes sense, but there are very good reasons why we had the city do this the first time. Perhaps for the next transit plan I’ll propose to the city that they should build a train that runs on magic beans and runs from outside of my office downtown, via my doorstep, to the the Carleton and the Best Buy on Merivale Road. There’s a reason that we have the city do this sort of thing, and a reason why many of the usual suspects go apeshit when “public-private” partnerships are introduced. Sure, we’re gonna build it and operate it, but should we be saying something about who designed it?
3. The cost. Chiarelli O-train plan: $780 million, including the maintenance contract. This one? $2 billion, which also includes the transitway and cumberland projects. But you can bet that a good chunk of that increase goes to the tunnel. Already in the transit committee minutes we see the hats getting ready to be put out, let’s just hope that the feds and province decide to be even more generous than last time.
4. Delays. Had we broken ground last December as planned, we’d be that much closer to having the buses removed from downtown. We’d be that much closer to having a mass transit system befitting a city of our size, let alone a National Capital. And we’d have insulated ourselves against at least 2 years of increases in the cost of labour, materials, and fuel, let alone legal and transaction costs.

Now, I do not think that the first plan was perfect: it should have used what rights of way it had to create the first stage of the east-west route, going as far east as Hurdman and possibly pushing west to Tunney’s Pasture. It should also have gone to the Airport. It is also unacceptable that, to this day, we can’t be sure what exactly was in the proposal because so much of it was kept from public eyes, leading to poor publicity and, in turn, people believing what they wanted to believe.

It’s also a testament to the dysfunction of this city that I think many people believed that if they didn’t get their part of the expanded o-train in the first go, they never would. That’s bad, in part because it discourages smart planning to meet growth, but also because it encourages a dangerous sort of IMBYism, where if it doesn’t directly affect your back yard, you are reactionarily opposed to spending money on it.
Previously on the Mike Powell Fan Club: David Gladstone on transit planning; Clive Doucet on another O-train proposal

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