During a summer of intense global heatwaves, this particular day stood out. It was hot. Really hot. Here in Ottawa, Canada's capital city of 1.1 million people, the thermometer surpassed 41 degrees centigrade with the humidex. That's hot. So it was on this scorching August day that I thought I would take my three-year-old daughter on a transit trip to the Rideau Centre. It's a large mall in the downtown core. After all, the buses, subway, and mall were all nicely air-conditioned. OC Transpo, Ottawa's transit authority, had different ideas. I quickly realized that Canada has a serious transit crisis.
Because it's summer, my kids are out of school. We took my daughter out of daycare because face it, that's too expensive (a completely different issue I'll tackle another time). Thankfully we put our son in a day camp for two weeks. My wife was working full-time for the feds. It was just my daughter and I. Daddy and daughter time!
We spent the week hanging out. Due to the heatwave, we had to stay indoors in the air conditioning during the afternoon, but we had adventurous mornings. We really got to bond while exploring the city splash pads, doing groceries together, and visiting baba (grandma) in Stittsville.
When Friday rolled around, I thought we could go on an adventure. We'd take the subway downtown.
Ottawa's shiny new light rail transit system is only two years old. It was unveiled with great fanfare in the autumn of 2019, two years behind schedule and several billion dollars over budget. It immediately ran into problems. The consortium that won the city contract included such stellar corporations as SC Lavallin and Bombardier. Both are known more for their slimy corruption than any type of quality product. So it was no surprise when the trains didn't work, and then the rails froze and snapped in the system's first winter. The electrical systems shorted out. One of the downtown subway stations sprung a leak and filled with stinky sewage. In the first six months, the train was shut down multiple times.
Six months later the COVID pandemic hit. Ridership fell. OC Transpo took a sigh of relief. The media had other stories to concentrate on, and reporters stopped asking questions about where all the money went that was slated for this massive project. If it cost so much, why didn't it work? The reporters turned their sights onto COVID and forgot all about Ottawa's dismal and amateurish LRT.
OC Transpo had never been stellar. In fact, the entire transit system is an embarrassment for Canada's capital city. The capital should have been the showcase. It should have set the standard for the entire country to follow. But the city was run by Boomers with Boomer mentalities (it still is). Suburbs and urban sprawl and highways were more important than transit. Only poor people took transit, and nobody cared about them.
I wasn't poor. When my 13-year-old Hyundai died, I decided not to buy a new car. I chose to go with public transit/bicycle/walking only. I could take Uber for groceries or on rainy days. I wasn't completely altruistic. Sure, I wanted to help and reduce my carbon footprint, but there was more to it. I wanted to simplify my life. Cars are the opposite of that. They are a constant pain in the ass.
Payments, insurance, gas, maintenance, oil changes, tire changes, arguments with insurance customer service, finding parking, paying for parking, fighting in traffic, dealing with idiots on the road, getting stuck in gridlock, red lights, people who don't signal, people who can't use rotaries, people who tailgate. The list is quite long.
A bus pass and an Uber gift card got rid of all of that.
But the buses never worked on time. They would not come when they were supposed to. I'd wait and wait, and after an hour, two buses would come, one following the other. Rather than space out the buses when one ran behind, they just jammed up. Hot summer days or freezing winter evenings were awful when the buses didn't arrive.
Ottawa didn't plow the sidewalks. They plowed the streets alright. There were a fleet of snowplows going back and forth all night long in front of my place. But to get to the bus stop I had to climb mountains of snow and wade through slush up to my knees. Then I would wait and wait and wait.
The bus drivers turned off their GPS when they were running late. I used the Transit app. I could see the buses literally disappear from the app. I learned that that meant the bus wasn't coming on time. The bus drivers didn't care.
I wrote to my city councilor. He did nothing. He didn't care. I wrote to OC Transpo. I never heard back. They didn't care. The buses didn't arrive, and they didn't go anywhere. If I wanted to get downtown, a 10-minute drive from where I live, it took nearly two hours and two transfers on the bus. One time I grew tired of waiting for the bus and walked for an hour until I reached my daughter's daycare. The bus arrived AFTER I did.
So when OC Transpo and Ottawa mayor Jim Watson unveiled the LRT, I laughed. I knew exactly what would happen. The city couldn't manage buses. How could they manage a rail system?
Sure enough, they couldn't. Finally the media took notice and pilloried OC Transpo. The LRT and the bus system in general were thrust into the spotlight. Ottawa looked amateurish.
My wife and I ended up buying a car. The bus system was too horrible. It didn't simplify life. It made it unbearable. We put up with the crap that comes with car ownership because even all of that is less worse than OC Transpo.
Fast forward two years and the heat had come off OC Transpo. The pandemic was in its second summer. It was ridiculously hot. I wanted to take my daughter downtown.
We got on the bus. Amazingly we only waited six minutes. But the bus wasn't air conditioned. The driver probably forgot to turn it on. That's annoying. It was hotter inside the bus than outside. With masks on, we were soon coated in sweat.
After 15 minutes or so, the bus arrived at the Hurdman LRT station. I hoisted my daughter off the bus and we walked to the entrance to board the train. But the entrance was gated off. The LRT was....closed! This was noon on a weekday. The entire LRT system was shut down.
Keep in mind that Ottawa has over a million inhabitants. It is the capital city of the second largest land mass in the world. It is a rich, stable, well-developed city. But after two years the LRT still couldn't be depended upon.
There had been no warning or notice anywhere. Twitter never told me the LRT was closed, and I followed OC Transpo. The Transit app didn't say it was closed. In fact, it told me to take the LRT to get downtown.
My daughter was upset. She had been super pumped to go on the "train that goes in the tunnel." I promised her we'd go another time. Instead, I'd take her to Billings Bridge mall and buy her an ice cream. She accepted that and forgot all about the train.
So we waited for a bus headed to Billings. One came. The route said "Billings Bridge." I knew this bus. It does go to Billings. We hopped on.
The bus did go to Billings, but only when it was going in that direciton. However, it also went far away from Billings in the other direction. Normally the sign on the front told you what direction it was heading. But when the driver forgot to change the sign, people ended up going on the wrong bus. Which is what happened to my daughter and I.
As the bus was heading in the wrong direction, I became worried. I told my daughter to sit in the chair and I staggered up to the front. "Is this bus going to Billings?" I asked.
"No"
"Oh, it said Billings on the front."
The driver reached up and hit a button, changing the sign. "Sorry, I forgot to change it." He informed me.
Great. I pulled the dinger-rope-thingy and grabbed my daughter and we got off the bus. We were somewhere I'd never been before. It was an industrial area. I figured I'd grab a bus going the other direction. Except, there were no buses heading that way. No bus stops whatever. I pulled open my map and learned the nearest bus stop was a 22 minute walk.
Remember how hot it was?
There were no trees. It was all warehouses and factory-offices. Cement roads. A tiny cracked sidewalk. We had no choice. We began to walk.
My daughter thought this was all a fun adventure. Her legs began to hurt. Poor girl was wearing flip flops, not the greatest shoes for long walks in +40 weather with no shade. I lifted her up and carried her.
We walked like that for 25 minutes. I was drenched in sweat. My daughter was drenched in my sweat. We found a couple of haphazardly planted saplings to shelter in the little shade they offered. Dump trucks passed us by, rumbling the ground as they went.
When we arrived at the bus stop, we only had to wait five minutes for a bus. It was air conditioned. Finally. It took us to Billings Bridge. Cooled off and with some energy restored, we sauntered off the bus and approached the mall. The mall was closed for renovations.
My daughter learned some unique expletitives at that moment. If her mother hears her repeat them, I'll be in trouble. We turned back to catch a bus home. At least we didn't have to walk in the sun.
The next bus home was in 22 minutes. We had to wait nearly half an hour for a bus, at a busy bus station, in the afternoon on a weekday, in a large city that was the capital of the country. OC Transpo is a serious embarrasment.
That's when I realized that nearly every city in Canada is way behind the curve on transit. All the politicians talk a big talk about tackling climate change. But public transit is proof that they aren't actually doing anything about it. The first step in getting cars off the road is building a viable transit system.
I lived in Asia as an English teacher. I lived in eastern Europe. Those places have remarkable transit. Catching a bus is a matter of waiting five minutes. Ten is the most I have ever had to wait. The subways and LRTs and buses never break down. They are never late. They always work.
Europe is filled with bike lanes, a trend I hear is catching on in Korea and Japan as well. Cars are a last resort kind of deal. They're more of a status symbol. People get around fine by bike and public transit.
Canada is nothing like that. From coast to coast the transit systems in Canada are garbage. Downtown Vancouver and downtown Toronto have decent transit. They function. But getting downtown requires a car.
Intra-city transit in Canada is abysmal. VIA Rail is ridiculously expensive. I wanted to take my family from Ottawa to Guelph, a drive of six hours in a car that would cost $50 in gas. The train would have been $400 and taken seven hours. VIA is losing money. They can't get passengers. The federal government keeps bailing them out. They seem stumped as to why.
If Canada wants to progress into the future with the rest of humanity, we need to focus on public transit. If Canada wants to lead the world in combating climate change, we need to focus on public transit. Our country is currently driver-centric. Entire economies are built around people owning a car. Cities are planned around roads for drivers, not pedestrians. Look at traffic lights. The pedestrian crossing last 10 seconds, and you need to press a button or it never changes. It lasts several minutes for drivers and is fully automated.
Drivers need to be weaned off cars. The economy needs to transition off cars. But that can't happen unless public transit is there first. The employees and planners of Canada's municipal public transit agencies need to stop treating their jobs as a lackadaisical hobby and go at them as professionals. They're providing an essential service that is also a world-changing and life-saving service. Routes that can't run on time need to be changed. Drivers who refuse to be on time need to be let go. City managers who squander money on corrupt corporations need to be charged.
Only once transit is taken as a serious endeavor and given the resources and tools it needs will Canada be ready for the future. Until then, we're stuck in the 1980s.
My daughter never got to go on the train that goes in the tunnel. At this point, she never will. I'll drive her in our nice air conditioned car. It is currently the only realistic option we have.