A tale of two cities; Toronto gets $1 billion for its transit system, Ottawa cuts $8.1 million from OC Transpo.
At the funding announcement for the TCC, Prime Minister Paul Martin said the transit system “keeps the heart of Toronto’s economic, cultural and social life alive and thriving.”
During his election campaign Mayor Bob Chiarelli told voters: “If we do not continue to build a world-class transit system, we will destroy our quality of life.” They both make it sound as if transit is pretty important to Canadian cities.
In Ottawa, OC Transpo is certainly important to the riders of the 8,000 daily trips on the 248 routes the city’s transit provides.
But the city’s budget tells us public transit isn’t perhaps as important as we thought.
By the end of the summer, 10 routes will be eliminated from OC Transpo’s services and 55 will have their frequency reduced. Six of the routes on the chopping block serve the Centretown area. Fourteen more go through parts of Centretown. For a city that just a few years ago claimed to have 20/20 vision into Ottawa’s future the cuts demonstrate blindness.
Martin says transit allows people to get to cultural and social activities and keeps a city alive.
Much of Ottawa’s cultural and social life is concentrated in the Centretown area. Yet, citizens, tourists and workers are now going to have a harder time getting there.
For years, citizens, businesses and community groups have been telling city councillors that there is too little parking space in the downtown core. However, the banished transit riders are now going to need somewhere to park. Maybe the city should start building some underground parking, but that’s something it seems to have had trouble getting its act together in the past.
OC Transpo at least provided an alternative to fighting for a parking spot, but the cuts mean that there will be approximately 1.5 million less bus rides taken over the course of a year.
That is 1.5 million fewer fares being thrown into OC Transpo’s budget, 55 per cent of which is composed of the $2.50 riders pay each time they get on the bus. The decreased routes certainly won’t be helping a transit system, which had a budget that was $11.4 million in the red last year.
It won’t be helping the suburban teens who want to get downtown, the late shift workers that want to just get home at the end of their long day or the low income families where taking the bus wasn’t an alternative – it was the only option.
Chiarelli is right. If you don’t support a transit system – the quality of life and efficiency of a city is affected.
Chiarelli also told voters in his victory speech last November that he wouldn’t let that happen.
Mr. Chiarelli — you just did.
~Julia Skikavich