An Open Message to Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe

The election is over and you can now free yourself from your election handlers. It is time to move your focus from getting elected to making Ottawa a better place to live.

So what should your first priority be. During an election campaign it is obviously whatever the largest group of voters will vote for, and you seemed to think that was NOT spending money on cycling infrastructure. But more on that later. The campaign is over.

You now need to think about what is most important to all Ottawans, and in particular vulnerable and disadvantaged ones. I put it to you that the most important thing to most of us, after our families, is our home. So try to imagine not having one. So, even if the homeless tend to not vote, as mayor they should be your most important concern.

Most municipal candidates seem to fear this issue mistakenly thinking it is too big a challenge and too costly an expenditure and they try to pass it on to other jurisdictions where it gets lost in a lack of political will. But Finland has shown that not only can providing homes for everyone be done, it saves money because it costs less than all the measures needed to deal with homelessness. It may take some imagination and dedication and work with other jurisdictions to get this done, but it can be done. There are people in Ottawa with the ability and dedication to make it happen. Work with them.

As to the apparent misplaced obsession of your election campaign, your opponent’s brilliant plan to finish Ottawa’s cycling network in 5 years instead of 25 while spending the same amount of money annually over 25 years, it is time to look at it on it’s merits and not how it can be twisted to your electoral campaign advantage.

How can one argue against a proposal that increases the cost effectiveness of city expenditures many times. You only get the benefits of any type of network when it is fully completed and interconnected. This plan expedites that so the construction costs are incurred when they are lower and the full benefits of taxpayers money is achieved in 5 years, 20 years before all the money is paid out by taxpayers. As well, networks are most effectively built from the inside out so that as much as possible of the network is interconnected. This means that it is the suburbs that benefit most from the expedited construction.

This plan, of course, does not only benefit cyclists. If you want to reduce automobile traffic congestion building more automobile infrastructure will not work because of a pesky thing called induced demand. The only way to reduce traffic congestion to reduce the number of cars on the road and that means improving public transit and cycling infrastructure. Since over 50% of car trips are short enough to be replaced by cycling, building an effective cycling network can be an important part of reducing automobile traffic congestion.

There is no reason to oppose this plan, which better spends taxpayers money, unless you simply do not want to spend any money at all on cycling infrastructure.

The War on Cars Starts Here – My Municipal Election Slogan

You don't have to actually run for office to have an election slogan, do you. Although my wife did suggest I take on our car loving, parking worshipping incumbent whose biggest priority is widening roads through the Greenbelt, I am too happy in retirement to go after a thankless twenty-four hour a day job. But I can still have an election slogan and mine is The War on Cars Starts Here.

Conventional wisdom would say that is a guaranteed losing slogan for a suburban candidate. But is it really.

After all, ask your typical suburban car commuter what they think of their commute and they will almost unanimously say that they hate it. Then ask someone who bikes or walks to work and the answer you will get is that they love it. Those that use public transit may have some complaints but almost all will be happy they do not have to drive in rush hour traffic, especially in the winter.

For some strange reason, even though studies and history has shown that building more roads never eases congestion problems, car drivers think that is somehow the answer to making their commute more bearable.

We do not need any more roads or any wider roads. We are over-serviced as far as roads go, except for two hours a day during the morning and evening rush hour. We spend millions and millions of taxpayers dollars trying to solve an unsolvable problem building more roads that we do not need ninety percent of the time.

The only solution that will really solve the problem for those people that drive to work are solutions that reduce the number of cars on the road, not so-called solutions that encourage more people to drive to work. We need to spend our tax money on alternatives to the hated car commute, on infrastructure for commuting solutions that people enjoy.

As with the Three Rs, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, Reducing commuting distances is the most important and effective solution to traffic congestion. We need to design and build our communities with more opportunities to work closer to home, and more opportunities to work from home.

That is where walking and cycling are the best alternatives, but they are not attractive if people feel unsafe. That is why we do not build sidewalks by drawing white lines to separate cars from pedestrians. Give people safe walking and cycling routes, preferably segregated, and they will use them.

Also improving the recreational pathway system will get more people onto their bikes and more people thinking about commuting on their bikes, especially if there is a comprehensive network that allows people to go from anywhere in the city to any destination without having to share major roadways with cars.

Winter is seen as a problem, but if you look at cities with similar climates to Ottawa that actually have good and extensive cleared winter cycling routes and infrastructure the number of winter cycling commuters is much higher than in Ottawa. If you build it they will ride it.

And of course making public transit a comfortable and enjoyable experience will increase ridership. It is already as fast and much less expensive than commuting by car. Indeed, I suspect for the majority of car drives, it is only stereotypes about public transit and psychological barriers that keep people off public transit.

Indeed if we provided secure and sheltered bike parking at the Park and Rides and an improved Bixi Bike system downtown and in major employment areas we could create a whole new commuter class of cycling public transit users, especially with the light rail system, where bike commuters would use the LRT for the long middle portion of their commute.

There is only one way to reduce traffic congestion on the roads and that is to reduce the number of cars on the roads. And there is only one way to do that and that is by improving infrastructure for the alternatives, public transit, cycling and walking.

The War on Cars Starts Here.