The Transit Option

With the new job, I’m taking the transit again.  There’s no real sense in taking the car downtown, as there is no upside in paying some wall-eyed, illiterate Elbonian $15 for the privilege of ignoring the thieves who go from vehicle to vehicle looking for something to steal.  Everywhere the signs say “We’re not responsible for damage, even if we do it, you have video of us doing it and we try to sell your car seats back to you at 5 pm, we’re still not responsible” in both official languages.

This is an improvement over Toronto where they zing you $40 for the privilege of stealing from your car while you’re at work.  For $60 they won’t damage your car deliberately.  Seventy gets your car urinated on by a street person who is certified not to have the Black Plague, but that’s Toronto and different rules apply in the GTA.    

The alternative is public transit.

Ottawa has a very nice transit system compared to several of the cities I’ve been in over the years.  Toronto has a mammoth system of busses, streetcars, heavy rail, light rail and subways to move a million or more folks around twice a day packed like the Clearasil delivery to a junior high school.  New York has a multisensory affront that works despite itself, much like New York City.  Washington D.C. uses their metro as a soma dispenser, aerosolizing benzodiazepines through the tunnels to keep the inmates placid.  Chicago figures that if we have to move you around, we might as well defy gravity, good sense and aesthetics of any sort beyond the Meccano style of industrial design.  Los Angeles’ defines public transit as “take your own car”:  The LA Bus (singlular tense) only runs on days that contain the letter M, between the hours of 2:00 pm and 2:15 pm from the garage to the nearest 7-11, then back. 

Off-shore, the transit in Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Budapest are icons of sleek efficiency, medical cleanliness and relentless precision.  You could have open heart surgery in the Budapest Metro, it’s so clean and odds are the driver of the metro is a former cardiac surgeon, who now makes a living wage as a train driver.  Viet Nam’s transit consists of being strapped to the pillion of a 60cc Honda Charly scooter with a basket of dysenteric ducks, a leaking 40 pound propane tank, the driver, his extended family and two officers from State Security while everyone smokes foul Cambodian cigarettes.

Ottawa, being the National Capitol, has a captured audience of government workers who toil in a few square miles on either side of the provincial border.  Consequently, the transit is set up to bus the drones to the hive at 8 then back home to the burbs at 4. If you miss your connections, you have to stay downtown.  The street-meat smog-dog carts close precisely at 1345 by government fiat and the rest of the stores are shuttered at 2.  If you are trapped downtown after 5 pm, you might as well find a nice stairwell that is out of the polar winds.

The O-Train, which I take every day, is a German-Canadian co-production of Bombardier, called the Talent.  It is what is known as ‘light rail’ meaning a stiff breeze makes it sway.  The O-Train uses a discarded Canadian Pacific freight line that went close enough to downtown that it could be considered service to ‘downtown’ if you use the area code as your sole measure of distance.  Yes, it does stay in the 613, so that’s near downtown isn’t it?  Kingston is in 613 too, so Kingston is in Downtown Ottawa as well, despite being a two-hour drive away. 

The maintenance of the tracks consisted of taking the abandoned shopping carts off the rails and pushing a burnt-out 74’ Econoline Shaggin-Waggon van off to one side.  Grafitti artists were given biker meth, a pallet-load of spray paint cans in unnatural colours and told to decorate to taste:  They did.  I have no idea who or what OrekTRON is but his compatriot OrekWES tagged The Home Depot at Greenboro in response to OrekTRON at Bayview station.

The O-Train waddles worse than a bunch of overweight nuns on a two-week absinthe bender.  The rails are so poorly maintained they resemble a trigonometry problem.  Switches, which at least conceptually, allow trains to go to other tracks, are designed so that any speed above a walking pace will derail the whole works into a ditch or off into the orphanage playground.  Despite the lack of money for maintenance and the temporary nature (temporary meaning it has been running as a proof of concept since 2001) it actually works. 

I can drive from home to the downtown in 45 minutes.  I can take the O-Train and be at the same place in 12 minutes.  Several thousand of us make the same decision every day, deciding that taking the car downtown is madness of the first order.

Where the O-Train falls over is connecting to anything else.  Ottawa spent a zillion dollars twenty-five years ago to create the Mighty Ditch, a dedicated bus transitway that was blasted out of the Nepean sandstone of Ottawa, about thirty feet below grade.  In this they run city buses with the frequency of every eleven seconds during rush hour, then rent it out as camping spaces in the off hours.  The O-Train connects to the Mighty Ditch at Bayview Station and you transfer to a bus to rocket through the downtown core.  If you miss your stop, you might wind up in New Brunswick.

There wasn’t quite enough foresight to consider putting rails in the Transitway while they were digging the ditch, which is now messing up the potential expansion of the O-Train to the East and West.  The estimates have added another couple of billion to the cost.  The other large addition is a proposed transit tunnel under downtown.  Twenty-five years ago we could have punched a hole underground for a few hundred million, connecting our smallish downtown together, out of the weather.  But that would be an example of common sense and was immediately shelved for ‘further study’.  At the time Ottawa had four levels of government that insisted they would never talk to each other.  The Feds, the Province, the Region and the City.  I’ve left out the NCC on purpose. 

The National Capitol Commission is its’ own peculiar reality chartered to ignore everyone, including themselves, with the kind of legal powers that make Idi Amin sigh longingly for the Good Old Days.  The NCC does whatever it wants, in secret and you are not permitted to comment, let alone disagree.  The NCC says so, which makes agreement regarding the underground transit tunnel impossible, as the NCC is the sole authority regarding anything under, in or over government buildings from the core of the planet to the sun, plus 40 miles in any given direction. 

The NCC doesn’t want to hear about the downtown transitway tunnel as they might be asked to pay for some of it.  If the other levels of government dare continue, the NCC will simply wave the “heritage designation” card claiming eminent domain over the entire subsurface of Ottawa.  After all, former Prime Ministers may have discarded a gin bottle somewhere and that historical artifact must be preserved and studied in situ for generations to come.  No, you may not dig a transitway for fear of disturbing important cultural and historical artifacts that frame the Canadian Experience.

Which brings us back to the lack of foresight we enjoy here in Ottawa from our multiple levels of governmental finger-bangin’.  By the way, I haven’t even mentioned the cross-border follies:  The National Capitol has a significant presence in Gatineau, which is in the province of Quebec, so take our current level of bureaucratic orifice probing and double it for any project that could potentially make things better for people trying to go to work.

In the meantime, the Ottawa politicians muddle about bumping into microphones, beeping and mooing about how terrible the tax bill will be and how complex the problem is becoming.  The problem is easy to fix, the bureaucracy is the stumbling block.