Introduction
On the first of April, the city released its Transportation Master Plan update. This is the third and final article in a three-part series on this joke. The first, link here, covers the contents of the plan. The second, link here, is a detailed rant on why this plan is terrible as a "Transportation Master Plan" (as opposed to, say, a feasibility study). This article will focus on how I think we got to this point, and what can be done about it.
This article contains much speculation. You have been warned.
I have filed a freedom of information request with the city for communication with city council on the TMP. I will share what I get, when I get it - don't expect to see anything for a while.
Two Parties (and a lot of interests)
When it comes to the TMP, there are two parties for which impetus for anything could have come from: staff and politicians, ie. the dominant suburban force of Sutcliffe-Kitts-Dudas-Tierney-Luloff-Carr-Lo-Brown-Brockington-Desroches-Hubley-Curry-Gower that could direct staff to study this or that.
As far as I am aware, politicians are not actually directly involved in the drafting of the TMP. But the culture they set has major consequences for what staff do or do not write, and staff will take direction from Council, even if Council itself is unaware of their influence. Additionally, directives related to things like the budget (sigh) or the prevailing political winds could also influence where staff go.
As far as staff themselves, the picture is less clear. Jim Watson's final term (2018-2022) was marred by accusations of the mayor exercising undue influence on council, bullying councilors who opposed him, and influencing staff to go his way. It's plausible that his influence extended to the ambitious 2013 TMP, which was fulfilled; but he is now gone, and council (and the mayor) are relative political rookies. Could it be that staff were directing this TMP, and leading the push for a less ambitious TMP?
There's plenty of competing interests over the TMP. From councilors looking for more transit, to urban priorities, from the big dreamers (à la Watson) to those controlling costs, there's a lot of different reasons the TMP may have ended up this way.
Staff
In examining the sources of the TMP's failure, city staff are the people who are actually doing the writing. There are a few reasons that staff could be going behind council's back/having their own agenda. One is that council did not provide any direction to staff at all, and so they can only put their own biases into the TMP. If staff were the main impetus behind the neutering of the TMP (which I think is unlikely, I will get to that), then this is the most likely direction - the TMP process began in 2023, and with a rookie council and mayor, this is a likely scenario.
Staff could also have other priorities. A generous interpretation would have them removing projects, in the hope that a smaller but better-defined list could get more funding from upper levels of government or from council itself. A conspiratorial interpretation has staff being "lazy" (to be clear, I do not think this is the actual sequence of events) and removing projects and reducing their workload for the TMP.
Do I think any of these scenarios are likely? Not really, with one caveat.
Frankly, council has great influence on the direction that staff take their reports. I would not rule any of these scenarios out, but recent events at OC Transpo and elsewhere have me thinking political interference is more likely than the absence of. And even in the absence of political direction, the tone and culture set by council, which is to find so-called "efficiencies and savings" rather than deliver a good service, will consciously or unconsciously influence staff to scale back projects to fit a self-imposed deadline (rather than keeping doors and horizons open, and figuring out the technicals later).
In short, I don't think staff are the likely culprit behind this disaster.
However, there is one massive red flag against this theory, and that's the scoring of projects.
Councilors don't have the bandwidth and wherewithal, and frankly, the knowledge, to assess and score projects. Unless the mayor or Cathy Curry is a bigger urban transit planning expert than they have revealed, the only reason the scoring of projects for inclusion in the Priority Network is so messed up can be from staff, and we can extrapolate this to the justification for exclusion (or inclusion) in the Needs-Based Network.
This caveat is subject to its own disclaimers with regards to politicization, council direction, and so on. It certainly presents a knot in the theory that council was responsible for this disaster, but unless/until we receive their communications, it's impossible to say for sure.
City Council's Merry-Go-Round
City Council is, and will continue to be, absent of any new evidence, the primary suspect in this mysterious case of poor planning, prioritization, and lack of ambition.
There's a few people that could have influenced the direction of this TMP.
The first, and most obvious, is the mayor. I don't he acted alone, and if he actually directly influenced the TMP, I expect it to be a combination of the culture argument advanced above and some more direct form of influence.
The second is that a councilor, or more likely, a coalition of councilors, pushed staff in this direction or that. Garbage in, garbage out, and what came out was a watered down piece of anti-ambition.
What's the most likely?
I think the mayor and a coalition of (almost certainly) suburban councilors are the most likely culprit. The mechanism of their crime against Ottawa, I don't know for certain (yet). I personally think that their focus on keeping taxes low and against ambitious transit plans tilted the playing field against a big TMP, but Jim Watson was hardly less lenient on tax increases and staff could easily have come up with a big list of projects for the Needs-Based Network that would then get whittled down to some urban (!) projects for the Priority Network.
Note that this theory could hold, though it is weaker, if either the mayor acting alone or a group of councilors without the mayor, did the same; however, in either case, it should have been balanced by other councilors pushing for their own projects.
In any large organization, the culture of the place influences the actions of staff, and the City of Ottawa is no exception. Jim Watson cultivated an environment where he was King Ottawa; while Sutcliffe has not seemed to do the same, that culture might have persisted through the political newness of the mayor and institutional inertia.
Another theory holds that Sutcliffe and/or a group of councilors explicitly directed the TMP team to choose suburban projects. I think this is less likely than subtle nudges and an institutional bias towards suburban projects; it would also be a political scandal if this was the case.
We know that councilors are allowed to advocate for their own projects, but in terms of provable political interference, the bar is much higher and staff are allowed to say no. But any influence will leave (sub)conscious traces in the TMP team's train of thought, and just a persistent councilor - say, Steve Desroches or Catherine Kitts - could have influenced, indirectly, the TMP process. And this requires no wrongdoing from anybody.
Again, this is all speculation. Unless my FOI request comes back with useful information (I hope it will, but will not hold my breath on transparency from the City), it will be impossible to know for sure.
Maybe we should make a wanted poster or two.
Conclusion
The short of it is, I think it's most likely that the mayor and a coalition of suburban councilors gave the TMP team a few nudges in the direction of less ambition and more suburbia, with the scoring system being an open mystery.
Short of some staff conspiracy to keep the city immobile by providing less transit and fewer roads, I can't see another scenario that fits how this city operates.
Soon, there will be a New Ways to Bus, and as such, new pathways to examine service reliability and consistency.
Until next time.
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