LRT might not be everything city tells us it will be

Will numbers hold up when we can’t predict the future?

City staff and most councillors seem supremely confident of the ultimate success of their everexpanding light rail plan, but in reality it’s a gamble based on a series of assumptions. It’s an expensive gamble, too. If all the proposed pieces are included, the first two phases of light rail and some associated road improvements will have cost taxpayers $5.7 billion and that’s without rail reaching either Kanata or Barrhaven.

The key assumption is that far more people will ride transit trains than have chosen to ride transit buses. City staff say with their new Stage 2 plan in place, transit ridership will increase by 10 per cent by 2031. Two per cent of that would have happened without the service improvements.

So for $3.6 billion, Ottawans will get an additional one-per-cent transit ridership increase annually between 2023, when the service starts, and 2031, when the city’s calculations end. That doesn’t sound game-changing, but the city’s cost-benefit analysis attributes great value to the transit spending.

The biggest gain is supposed to be from travel time savings. By 2048, city seers say, drivers will be saving 13 million “person-hours” a year, while transit riders will save 12 million “person-hours.” One would have thought it difficult to put a value on a person-hour, but city consultants have done so. At nearly $4.8 billion, this is by far the largest cumulative benefit attributable to the Stage 2 project.

In more mundane terms, transit riders will save 10 minutes on their daily commute. Is that valuable? Drivers’ time saving is predicated on the idea that more people will actually use transit. Growth and a limited road system might well make congestion worse than it is today, but it will be less bad than it would have been without the additional transit ridership. That has some value, but not the kind that goes straight to most people’s wallets.

Put another way, the city anticipates that transit’s share of the transportation pie will increase from 22 per cent in 2011 to 26 per cent by 2031. After all the spending, Ottawa will still be a car-dependent city.

The other big saving from the new Stage 2 plan is an anticipated $1.7 billion in vehicle operating costs over a 25-year period, starting in 2023. Those savings will be experienced entirely by drivers who convert to transit, not by the broader taxpayer group that is paying for the whole thing.

The city also estimates that there will be collision cost savings of $618 million over a 25-year period and environmental benefits from emissions reductions of $438 million. The environmental benefits assume that there hasn’t been a mass conversion to electric vehicles.

The light-rail plan all rests on the idea that we can accurately predict what will happen over the next three decades, but there are already visible trends that would call into question the idea that the future will be much like the present.

Demographics suggest population growth will be limited, but without steady population growth, we won’t hit our transit ridership targets. The most recent figures from Statistics Canada tell us that Ottawa hasn’t been growing as quickly as city hall predicted. To make that problem worse, our most rapid areas of population growth are in the southern suburbs and Kanata, areas that won’t be reached by the Stage 2 plan.

Then there is transportation technology. Electric cars and autonomous cars have the ability to revolutionize road travel, dramatically changing the equation on the cost and environmental impact of using a car. If automobiles go electric, the green cachet and environmental savings of transit will disappear.

Despite all of that, there is no real opposition to expanding light rail. Having spent so much money to build the short first phase, the city really has no choice but to extend the service. Failure to do so would turn transit into a transfer nightmare.

Maybe it will all work out. Taxpayers have to hope so, because an awful lot of their dollars are riding on this transit venture.