Public transit is no longer the city's cure-all

Pandemic has created new model for how, when and where people work

The pandemic has derailed Ottawa's new transit system before it is complete, and it's becoming increasingly unlikely it will get back on track.

The numbers presented to the city's transit commission last week paint a stark picture. Ridership has rebounded only modestly in the first quarter of the year. The city budgeted for 18 million transit trips over those three months, but there were only 11 million. The city target is not ambitious, estimating that ridership this year will be below that of 2019, finally catching up with levels of three years ago by the end of this year.

That looks wildly optimistic now, an estimate built on the idea that public servants would return to work downtown. That notion was spiked earlier this month when Treasury Board President Mona Fortier declared that so-called hybrid work would be the way of the future. That's going to mean a lot fewer people making trips downtown every day.

That's bad news for those who believe public transit is a virtuous cure-all for the city's development and transportation woes, and for property-tax payers who will bear an increasing share of the fixed cost for a transit system that delivers far less value than anticipated.

Making transit “free,” as some suggest, will only make the tax burden worse. The bottom didn't drop out of transit ridership because of price. It's a problem of demand. If you don't need to take transit, you won't use it at any price.

The city's stance, so far, seems to be to wait and hope something might happen to restore demand for transit. That's exceptionally unlikely. Many public servants have grown accustomed to working from home and they like it. The government certainly isn't going to force them to work downtown just to keep Ottawa's public transit and downtown viable.

The pandemic has changed the nature of work, where people want to live and how they get around. The city has to accept that reality. It's a challenge because the sustaining myth at city hall is that staff can create master plans that will guide every aspect of what the city does. Surprises are difficult to factor in.

Now, many of the assumptions those plans rest on are changing and the city lacks some of the data necessary to react. The city's last transportation plan was released in 2013. There won't be another until 2024. Don't be shocked if it doesn't show too many people heading downtown.

Ottawa's new official plan will also be affected by the shifting work and transportation patterns. The city is keen on lots of development near transit stations. If people aren't using transit as much, that seems less attractive.

Most councillors still reflexively oppose suburban development, but if more people are going to live and work in new suburbs, does it matter that they aren't close to downtown?

Rail transit for Ottawa was always an old idea designed to support another old idea. The notion that everyone should work downtown was out of date long before the pandemic. Light-rail transit, while new to us, has been around elsewhere for decades.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of its proponents, public transit is consistently oversold. No doubt that was necessary to convince the public that a light-rail system was worth billions of dollars. To put transit's value in context, in

2011 transit delivered about 22 per cent of daily commuters. By 2031, new LRT in place, that number was supposed to rise to 26 per cent.

Public transit in Ottawa was a partial solution to the problem of how to get large numbers of people to the same place at the same time.

The pandemic, it seems, has solved that problem, reducing emissions and traffic at the same time.

That's good news, mostly, but it still leaves the not-small problems of finding a new purpose for Ottawa's downtown and sustaining the cost of a transit system built for another era.

That's where councillors should focus their attention.