[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Departures every minute: this airport is for buses"][/caption] Once you get into the details, there are so many things that are different about Turkey’s shared transport system from Ottawa’s that it’s difficult to know where to start. For example, in Ankara, there are two kinds of buses those for passengers with passes called ‘ego’ and those cash fare – only buses. The cash fare buses have conductors which from an Ottawa perspective seems unnecessary, but when you see a full-on transit system operating at capacity 18 hours a day, it’s a whole different thing. Consider that an articulated bus costs more than half a million dollars. An Ankara conductor can load 25 people faster than it can take an Ottawa bus driver to load two passengers looking for change or one mother with a stroller. The speed differential at bus stops is phenomenal. I’d guess it’s something like 20 to 25 % faster at every stop – that’s 20 per cent more productivity out of a half million dollar capital investment. Multiply that by how many buses you’ve got in your fleet, let’s say a 1,000 and suddenly you’ve got 200 more buses on the road.

[caption id="attachment_5935" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Turkish "Dolmus" (shared cab)"][/caption] I enjoyed Adam Bentley’s transit map vision for Ottawa of the future, but nevertheless found it frustrating that the mindset in my home town can’t think about making it happen now.  I don’t believe the Bentley vision is pie in the sky for two seconds.  If we had gone ahead with the North/South project we would be well on our way to exactly this kind of region wide comprehensive service instead of stuck with what we have, which is the most expensive commuter service to operate in the country (combination of distances and deadheading), grafted on to an old city bus service that has less service for many parts of the city than it did 40 years ago.

[caption id="attachment_5803" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="F-35 (with engine): a viable National Transit Stragegy?"][/caption] Cities are not like trees. They are not a biological phenomenon. You can’t just add water and sunlight and expect a city to grow out of the ground. They are dependent on human organization and human organization has always depended upon politics. Politics are how we allocate the resources that produce a city’s food and water supplies, the infrastructure, the governance, the built form, the security, the possibilities for commerce, the commitment to shared objectives. Without successful politics cities fail. The most important thing that happened to the city of Ottawa in the last decade was the 2006 election. In the Chiarelli/Munter/O’Brien election, the winner Larry O’Brien with John Baird’s crucial support managed to kill the contract that would have created the lowest cost light rail line in North America and begun to the transformation of the city from a car dependent city to a transit-first city. The direct costs to the city of that contract cancellation were a $100 million in lost start up costs and fines for broken contracts . The indirect costs were in the billions.

It’s easy to understand why Mr. Harper is so enamoured with the coffee and donut franchise. They are everywhere from fishing villages on Cape Breton Island to the largest cities, and the Tim Hortons logo is omnipresent at the Brier, at the World Juniors, at the Olympics. Wherever Canadians gather, Tim Hortons is there. They even have the contract for the Kandahar cafeteria. No wonder Mr. Harper loves to be photographed wearing the Canada logo and near a Tim’s. I like Tim Hortons. I love Canada. I like Mr. Harper. It’s as easy as one, two, three. The trouble is , it isn’t. “Tim Hortons politics” doesn’t work for cities. Cities are where 80% of Canadians live and cities are a whole lot more complicated than charming photo-op associations. Cities depend on five giant, complex pillars, 1) food and water, 2) governance, 3) infrastructure, 4) security, 5) culture. Each pillar is as important as the other. Each is inter-dependent, without one pillar, the others will eventually fail.

It’s hard to find anything in the world that I find more tiresome than listening to an ‘expert’ explain how the suburbs can be more sustainable if they were planned better - but we have to accept them because the suburbs are where the cheap housing is. It’s as if cheap suburban housing is an Act of God and expensive housing in the city centre is the distaff performance. The latest in a long line is Joel Kotkin in the Globe and Mail, (March 14). Cheap, suburban housing has got zero to do with good or bad planning. It never has, not since Levittown was invented. Cheap suburban housing was a political creation, it always has been and remains so. It’s a deliberate, continuing act of city councils right across North America. Suburban tract housing, highway arterials, warehouse districts (malls) are subsidized by all levels of government and have been for 70 plus years.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="599" caption="Whistler Mayor Ken Melamed inspects the infrastructure"][/caption] It seems like you’ve landed in paradise when you arrive in Whistler. The road winds along a coastline of staggering beauty with mountain peaks draped like snow capped cathedrals in every direction. I kept wanting to rub my eyes like a child, expecting to wake up in the familiar, calmer landscape of the Ottawa valley. I’ve skied for a long time but never in mountains with the variety of pitches and landscapes as Whistler. We skied off the mountain top down into Blackcomb glacier where no photograph could capture the magnitude of those towering rock faces and great fields of glistening snow. To be there was as unforgettable, as was the skiing. I was told by a resident that it was the best skiing he’d seen in 41 years - white powder from every peak to valley floor. You could let your skis run for more than four kilometers without stopping on one of the longest runs in the world. After four days of non-stop skiing, I began to wonder if it was possible to be snow drunk  so unending, so white and encompassing was the landscape.