When it’s easy to scold

Ken Gray takes Algonquin students to task today because so many of them choose to drive to that somewhat dreary suburban campus at Baseline and Woodruffe, rather than take a bus:

One of the biggest complaints at the college is not the lack of student common space, to be remedied by a new $52-million building, but the fact there isn’t enough parking. So the students stuff the side streets with their cars, fill the Park-and-Ride lot cutting down the number of people who can jump from car to bus, and take up space in College Square so that merchants lose customers.

The car should be the last resort for students travelling to Algonquin. That was the choice of their parents. Across the street from the campus is the major Transitway station for the area.

Sure some rural students might need to take a car to campus (and even they don’t have to if a Park-and-Ride lot has space), but there is little excuse for urban dwellers to take their autos.

So help save costs and the environment. Take OC Transpo … it couldn’t be more convenient, just across the street. Algonquin students should stop being like many of their parents who just drive and complain about parking.

If this is the future of the green movement, the environment doesn’t have a chance.

Ken is right of course; we need to encourage public transit use. But scolding people simply because they are an easy target is not the kind of encouragement we need. Ken seems to see Algonquin students as youth, comparing them to their parents, as if they are all still living with mom and dad, whereas many of the Algonquin students I know are already parents themselves. They are in the workforce, and are going to college to improve their skill set, and qualify for a better job. Many are doing the daycare run before and after the day’s classes, too.

So if we are going to lecture, let’s start with the people who need to hear it most. How about those commuting to the part of Ottawa that is better served by public transit than anywhere else? Above is a streetview capture of a parking garage on Slater near Bank. Here is a partial list of the buses that stop nearby:

Downtown Ottawa provides well for its automobile users; dozens of parking facilities like the one above add up to provide a ratio of three spots to every ten jobs in the area. By contrast, Algonquin has parking for 3000, for a total student population of 16,000. That’s three spots for sixteen people, not even counting the staff who also share in the spots. Yes, some crowd the side streets and some abuse a nearby Park and Ride, but the real story about Algonquin is that the people who find their way there every day seem to do a better job of using public transportation than what we expect of our downtown workforce, who are actually provided with a much wider selection of routes.

I don’t know how Ken Gray gets to work in the morning, but there is something of the Andy Haydon approach to his remarks. It says “our bus system is is good enough for the kind of people we designed it for – they just need use it more.” This attitude associates public transport with students and low income residents, and stops us seriously looking at policies that would convince car commuters to change their mode of transport.

So before we wag our fingers at students, let’s look again at the picture above. Spot the transitway station on Slater? You literally could not put it closer to a parking garage; a garage that fills up everyday with cars owned by people who, for one reason or another, do not wish to avail themselves of transit options that bring them to exactly the same location. As long as we make it easy for them to make the choices they do, we can’t scold a younger cohort for doing the same.