The EnviroCentre's Daniel Spence (Darren Brown, OBJ).

Ottawa businesses large and small should prepare for a major hit on their bottom lines unless they jump in to curb current traffic trends.

That's the message from Daniel Spence, sustainable transportation coordinator at Ottawa's EnviroCentre, a non-profit organization that provides environmental services to the public, private and voluntary sectors.

But instead of the strictly environmental- and health-related dangers of traffic congestion that "green" advocacy groups so often emphasize, Mr. Spence and his group focus on the economic costs to business and individuals that "one-person, one-vehicle" commuting incurs.

"As the economy grows, as the number of businesses and employees grow, it's going to mean more people trying to get to work. More people on the roads in their own cars will mean a lot more traffic congestion. It'll mean a lot more demand on road maintenance, a lot more wear and tear on the existing roads, and greater demands for new roads to be built," Mr. Spence explained. "The city just doesn't have the budget for (new roads) and is not budgeting for (them)."

Indeed, according to 2003 municipal statistics, each car trip costs the individual and corporate taxpayers 43 per cent more than a trip by public transit. It also costs big money to build city streets – anywhere from $900,000 to $2 million per kilometre plus the cost of the land. Currently, more than 185,000 car trips are taken every afternoon during rush hour in Ottawa. By 2021, 400,000 more people will live in Ottawa, many owning cars. Simply put, the city and its taxpayers can't afford to build more roads for all of these cars, and in some cases there isn't room to build, even if there was money.

Last Wednesday, Statscan released a report called "Work and Commuting in Central Metropolitan Areas" that throws even more light on economic and related commuter trends, including Ottawa's. The report will likely ratchet up the pressure on government and business to find a way to prevent municipal transportation infrastructure from collapsing under its own weight. For example, in Ottawa–Gatineau, suburb-to-suburb commuters accounted for 41 per cent of all employment growth between 1996 and 2001. But only seven to eight per cent of suburb-to-suburb commuters took public transit.

Using census data for the periods 1996 to 2001, Statscan's Andrew Heisz, the report's co-author, said in an interview that Ottawa showed "strong growth" in areas that were greater than 15 kilometres from the city core, which he said was likely associated "with fast growth in the late '90s in Kanata." Of the 64,000 more commuters on the road during this period, more than a third were going to work "fairly distant from the downtown core." At the same time, he said, commutes within suburbs grew about 32 per cent and commutes from one suburb to another grew by 18 per cent, although the rates of transit use are "very low." "The challenge is promoting public transit use to these growing suburban areas," he concluded.

Potentially crippling statistics and trends like those have prompted EnviroCentre to take the lead since 2001 in promoting the "Commuter Challenge" in Ottawa. Set to coincide with Environment Week (June 5 to 11), the challenge involves the participation of more than 400 local workplaces at all levels of the private, government and education sectors. Individuals are being encouraged to walk, bike, ride transit, carpool or telework to help increase their workplace's participation rate in the Challenge. Judging by the support from the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce and OCRI for the Commuter Challenge, traffic congestion has clearly caught the eye of the business sector.

"Those companies that sign on are quite excited. It's supposed to be as easy as possible just to sign on. Take the materials that we give you, promote it, and try to get as many of your staff as possible to participate," Mr. Spence explained.

Some businesses are clearly not seeing the big picture. "It's not a glitzy issue, so it doesn't necessarily get a lot of attention until it becomes a business issue, as it is going to."

Mr. Spence points to the February 2005 municipal budget, in which the City of Ottawa has adopted Transportation Demand Management, or TDM, as a long-term strategy for dealing with insufficient budget to fix the roads needed to accommodate the growing economy, population and number of cars.

The 2005 budget document puts the case bluntly: "The Transportation Master plan identifies TDM as an essential element to reducing the need for new and widened roads for motorized vehicles and giving priority to walking, cycling and transit. TDM initiatives are aimed at reducing the demand for car travel at peak periods, shifting travel to non-peak periods and supporting walking, cycling and transit initiatives."

What is TDM in layman's terms? "Commuter options," says Mr. Spence, "getting people to explore the options of how to get to work other than just driving by themselves every day."

"If businesses want to be leaders in this, it's best to start early on their own terms now, because TDM is here to stay." He said the city itself is in the final stages of establishing a rigorous and wide-ranging TDM program for its own employees, which should be a clear signal to local businesses that the bar is being raised.

Nortel has been a leader in TDM since 1998, when it negotiated with regional and local governments to build its Carling Campus during the tech boom. One result of that partnership was a commitment by Nortel to implement a plan to manage commuting to and from its location in the green belt.

According to John Sauvé, Nortel's manager for workplace innovation, its "Green Commute" TDM program continues to be a major source of employee satisfaction, and the program is enhanced each year to improve – and even eliminate altogether – the costly daily commute. "We give people choices on how they get to work, or how they do their work," referring to the growing trend of teleworking within the company. In Ottawa, 45 per cent of Nortel's 5,500 employees are currently registered as full- or part-time teleworkers, saving the company a bundle on office and parking space overhead.

Nortel increasingly adopts a "managing-by-results" rather than "managing-by-attendance" approach, he said.

By Jeff Esau

Special to the Ottawa Business Journal