Little benefit to come from Ottawa's $30M plan for commuters | Opinion

A September 2024 file photo of Bowesville Station. The City of Ottawa's 48-point plan for managing the impact of increased commuting due to the federal government's four-day-per-week return to office mandate includes $20.1 million to move up the expansion of the park-and-ride lot at Bowesville Station. Photo by Tony Caldwell /POSTMEDIA

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The City of Ottawa’s plan to manage public service return-to-office commuting volumes has a price tag of $30 million, but precious little of that will offer any significant benefit to commuting public servants in the short term.

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The biggest expense in the 48-point plan is $20.1 million to move up the expansion of a park-and-ride lot at Bowesville Station near the end of the city’s southern Trillium Line. The plan is to double the size of the lot by adding up to 1,000 spots. This would add a modest benefit to commuting public servants in the southern suburbs, eventually.

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This is something the city was already planning, and it was to be paid for by development charges and transit debt. Now the city hopes to get up to half of the cost covered by a new federal and provincial fund meant to reduce development charges. Free money from other levels of government is always irresistible, but the benefit to the feds is tiny and to the province it’s non-existent.

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The city also proposes spending just under $4 million on a sidewalk and enhanced express bus service to link the LRT’s western terminus at Moodie Drive with the Department of National Defence’s Carling Avenue campus. That will only go ahead if the feds pay most of the cost.

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Federal government workers would benefit, but it’s an embarrassingly trivial ask. The city’s western LRT stops in the middle of nowhere. Can Ottawa not afford a sidewalk to connect it to a major employment location just 1.5 kilometres away?

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For the moment, this is all theoretical. LRT service to Moodie Station will open next year at the earliest.

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There are two things in the plan that will have more immediate benefit, and they involve an old idea made new. For years, suburban commuters loved express buses that would take them straight downtown. Who wouldn’t?

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That service was ultimately replaced by a new approach that would drop commuters off at LRT stations, adding an unwelcome transfer to an unreliable service. Now some express buses are back.

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The city will spend $1.1 million to add express routes from park-and-rides and other major suburban locations. It will spend $300,000 to continue express bus service from Blair Station to downtown. That last one is notable because it largely duplicates the service of the city’s stunningly expensive Confederation Line. The bus is faster because it doesn’t have to stop at all stations. Now there’s an idea.

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Despite its obvious limitations, the plan’s biggest controversy was over a strategy to encourage people to linger downtown after work in the hope that this would spread out the afternoon commute. It’s not a terrible idea in theory, but why does the city need to inform people about what’s happening downtown?

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Public servants have been working downtown three days a week for nearly two years. Surely they can figure it out for themselves.

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Mayor Mark Sutcliffe says the communications will be strictly about the changes the 48-point plan will bring. OK, but does it really take a $160,000 communications budget to describe a few new express routes and some traffic tweaks?