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Shuffling government offices around to create the illusion of economic growth is bad for Ottawa, but it’s election time so of course our would-be politicians are talking about it.
It happens every campaign, on scales both large and small. Ottawa’s been stripped of the Department of Veterans Affairs (gone to Charlottetown), Natural Resources labs (off to Hamilton) and the Canadian Tourism Commission (Vancouver), all to buy votes in previous elections. Within Ottawa, offices have been pushed around for reasons both practical and political, mainly consolidating lots of workers in abandoned high-tech campuses in Nepean.
Now it’s Andrew Leslie, the Liberal candidate in Orléans, who wants to build a new government complex on the National Defence proving grounds on the west edge of Chapel Hill, close to Blackburn Hamlet.
“I learned to drive there,” he says, pointing up at the ridge that runs along the north end of the property and extends to the roundabout at Jeanne d’Arc and St. Joseph boulevards. He was a young soldier, he says. “They didn’t think it was a good idea to have an 18-year-old driving around towing a gun on civilian streets.”
The property is large, the federal government owns it, and it’s been redeveloped over and over again in different politicians’ imaginations, though not in real life.
The argument is that spreading jobs around more widely will reduce traffic crowding onto particular roads, reducing the stress on what Leslie calls “pinch points” like the 417-174 split.
Yes and no.
People who live in one suburb and work in that suburb won’t have to get downtown, and that’s helpful as far as it goes. But what if, as has been known to happen these days, more than one person in a household works? Where does the family move?
For transportation planners, getting people from one high-density area to another is a simple problem. Getting people from a low-density suburb to a high-density downtown and back is trickier but doable. Getting people from one low-density suburb to another low-density suburb is a nightmare. You can’t devise either a road network or a transit system that’s good at getting people from everywhere to everywhere without spending a fortune on it.
In Ottawa we can barely afford rush-hour bus service out of and into outlying neighbourhoods as it is. Inter-suburban bus routes are almost nonexistent because there isn’t enough demand, and a couple of thousand bureaucrats will move the needle but not enough. Stick the Department of Finance in a field in Blackburn Hamlet and how are its multiply-degreed forecasters and tax experts going to get there from Kanata?
They’re going to drive. Even when the city’s light-rail plans are fulfilled and trains run along Highway 174, it would take an extra station serving a train line running in the highway median and a shuttle on a new road to get workers to and from such a campus. It isn’t far-far from the 174, but it isn’t close, either.
This is not theoretical. It’s already happening: OC Transpo’s ridership has taken hits over the past couple of years and its planners blame, in part, a decline in downtown jobs even as overall employment in Ottawa has done OK. As bad as it is trying to get into downtown Toronto at rush hour these days — a problem both Ontario and the federal government are spending billions and billions of dollars to try to solve — the real nightmare there is getting from Mississauga to Markham.
(And biking or walking? Nobody would do that but the hardest of the hard core.)
Orléans’s Conservative incumbent Royal Galipeau, to his credit, has refused to promise any mass movement of federal jobs to the east end. It’s robbing one part of the city for the benefit of another, he says. If we’re talking jobs underwritten with a lot of public money, he’d rather encourage new ones, such as in a fledgling cybersecurity research cluster.
On the other hand, Galipeau hasn’t managed to keep his government from moving RCMP jobs to south Nepean or National Defence jobs to the former Nortel campus, because fellow Conservatives like Pierre Poilievre and John Baird haven’t been as fastidious about Galipeau’s principles.
Moving jobs en masse out of downtown as an economic development measure adds nothing to productivity. It’s disruptive to families, bad for downtown, bad for transportation in general and transit in particular. Legislators who really love Ottawa should fight it.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
It happens every campaign, on scales both large and small. Ottawa’s been stripped of the Department of Veterans Affairs (gone to Charlottetown), Natural Resources labs (off to Hamilton) and the Canadian Tourism Commission (Vancouver), all to buy votes in previous elections. Within Ottawa, offices have been pushed around for reasons both practical and political, mainly consolidating lots of workers in abandoned high-tech campuses in Nepean.
Now it’s Andrew Leslie, the Liberal candidate in Orléans, who wants to build a new government complex on the National Defence proving grounds on the west edge of Chapel Hill, close to Blackburn Hamlet.
“I learned to drive there,” he says, pointing up at the ridge that runs along the north end of the property and extends to the roundabout at Jeanne d’Arc and St. Joseph boulevards. He was a young soldier, he says. “They didn’t think it was a good idea to have an 18-year-old driving around towing a gun on civilian streets.”
The property is large, the federal government owns it, and it’s been redeveloped over and over again in different politicians’ imaginations, though not in real life.
The argument is that spreading jobs around more widely will reduce traffic crowding onto particular roads, reducing the stress on what Leslie calls “pinch points” like the 417-174 split.
Yes and no.
People who live in one suburb and work in that suburb won’t have to get downtown, and that’s helpful as far as it goes. But what if, as has been known to happen these days, more than one person in a household works? Where does the family move?
For transportation planners, getting people from one high-density area to another is a simple problem. Getting people from a low-density suburb to a high-density downtown and back is trickier but doable. Getting people from one low-density suburb to another low-density suburb is a nightmare. You can’t devise either a road network or a transit system that’s good at getting people from everywhere to everywhere without spending a fortune on it.
In Ottawa we can barely afford rush-hour bus service out of and into outlying neighbourhoods as it is. Inter-suburban bus routes are almost nonexistent because there isn’t enough demand, and a couple of thousand bureaucrats will move the needle but not enough. Stick the Department of Finance in a field in Blackburn Hamlet and how are its multiply-degreed forecasters and tax experts going to get there from Kanata?
They’re going to drive. Even when the city’s light-rail plans are fulfilled and trains run along Highway 174, it would take an extra station serving a train line running in the highway median and a shuttle on a new road to get workers to and from such a campus. It isn’t far-far from the 174, but it isn’t close, either.
This is not theoretical. It’s already happening: OC Transpo’s ridership has taken hits over the past couple of years and its planners blame, in part, a decline in downtown jobs even as overall employment in Ottawa has done OK. As bad as it is trying to get into downtown Toronto at rush hour these days — a problem both Ontario and the federal government are spending billions and billions of dollars to try to solve — the real nightmare there is getting from Mississauga to Markham.
(And biking or walking? Nobody would do that but the hardest of the hard core.)
Orléans’s Conservative incumbent Royal Galipeau, to his credit, has refused to promise any mass movement of federal jobs to the east end. It’s robbing one part of the city for the benefit of another, he says. If we’re talking jobs underwritten with a lot of public money, he’d rather encourage new ones, such as in a fledgling cybersecurity research cluster.
On the other hand, Galipeau hasn’t managed to keep his government from moving RCMP jobs to south Nepean or National Defence jobs to the former Nortel campus, because fellow Conservatives like Pierre Poilievre and John Baird haven’t been as fastidious about Galipeau’s principles.
Moving jobs en masse out of downtown as an economic development measure adds nothing to productivity. It’s disruptive to families, bad for downtown, bad for transportation in general and transit in particular. Legislators who really love Ottawa should fight it.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
