Fixing public transit starts with fixing Rideau St

The following is an opinion piece by Casey Callahan and Nick Grover of FREE TRANSIT OTTAWA:

Rideau St has a reputation for being busy, chaotic, and congested. Many of us have accepted this frustration as an inevitable reality of downtown living. But it doesn’t have to be – and leaving it in it’s current state is making transit unreliable across the city.

Rideau is a transit artery, carrying half a dozen critical bus routes (the 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 17, and 18). But as any bus rider knows, travelling down this road is a slog, taking seemingly forever to get from one end to the other. As a result, a bus with fifty people on it is delayed because it’s stuck in traffic behind fifty cars carrying the same number of passengers. This is not an efficient way to travel.

Transit priority is badly needed. This involves dedicating one lane in each direction to exclusive use by buses. It’s a simple, cheap, and effective way to let buses bypass traffic to show up on time and on schedule.

Lack of reliability is one of the biggest issues plaguing OC Transpo. The busiest routes in the city are over five minutes late 40% of the time. By contrast, cities who implemented bus lanes reduced travel time significantly: by about 20% overall and double that during hours of peak traffic delay. (Ideally, combined with “traffic signal priority”; sensor technology that gives buses an early green if they are waiting at the intersection.)

The kicker is, Rideau St already has bus lanes, in a way. The fact that they are only in effect temporarily (from 6-9:30AM and 2:20-6PM on weekdays) means two things. First, buses still must bob and weave around parked cars during the afternoon and evening while riders endure horrible traffic on the weekends. And second, their temporary nature means they aren’t even very effective during peak hours, likely because the instructions are lost in a mess of overhead signage. Cars are constantly driving and parking in bus lanes.

One of the best things the city can do immediately is paint the lanes red, so all road users know what they are and cars stay out of the lanes. San Francisco measured the impact of this simple change and found hundreds fewer car violations.

Permanent 24/7 bus lanes are the answer. The trade off is that a relative handful of cars lose street parking in exchange for faster, reliable transit connecting people to the rest of the city.

But won’t fewer lanes make traffic worse? Cars slowing down to park is probably a worse offender for this, but taking the long view we can see that functional transit means higher ridership as people opt not to drive in the first place.

But what about the small businesses who rely on street parking? Research shows buses on a dedicated lane can bring three times more people to an area than mixed traffic, so there’s actually a huge opportunity here for the local economy.

Right now, most people drive because OC Transpo isn’t a viable option. The longer the mayor and city council fail to fix the dire state of Ottawa’s bus service the worse traffic, emissions, air pollution, and commuting headaches will become.

October 26th is the municipal election. Let’s ask for this one small but significant change in our backyard to get transit moving again.