OTTAWA, WHERE BUSES ARE KING

IN OTTAWA, CANADA’S CAPITAL CITY, traffic is kept to a bearable nuisance level through new-tech uses of an old-tech solution: buses.

Yes, buses. Ottawa’s revolutionary tran-sitway system is built to act like a rail system, only better. Buses, which carry 70 percent of Ottawa’s downtown work force each day, travel on two-lane roadways that reach from downtown outward to the suburbs. Stations along the transitways look and feel like rail stations. Some buses operate both on and off the transitways, while others stick strictly to the special roads. During rush hours, patrons need wait only four to five minutes at a station for a bus.

Since 1981, OC Transpo-Ottawa’s version of DART-has built about twelve miles of two-lane roadway with ten stations. Houston’s busway building boom might appear more aggressive-seventy-one miles in under a decade-but the one-lane, one-way Houston version is open to vans and, in some instances, cars with only two people. Ottawa makes exceptions only for emergency vehicles.

“The thing that’s happened, of course, is that we’re now running at volumes that exceed those of any light rail system that’s been built in North America, in the last twenty years anyway,” says John Bonsall, OC Transpo general manager and the planner who conceived the transitway system.

That’s no idle boast. More than 200,000 riders a day take Ottawa’s transitways. Compare that to the model San Diego light rail system, which is proud of drawing 27,000 riders a day. About 9.000 Ottawans pass through the busiest segment on the transitway during the busiest hour of the day, compared to 1,200 an hour on San Diego’s rail system and 4,200 an hour on Houston’s busiest bus lane.

Ottawa was opening the first small segments of its transitway system in 1983 as Dallas-area voters gave their overwhelming consent to join the light rail renaissance. The first busway-only system planned in North America bucked the trend, an experiment that drew little notice in the early Eighties. But Bonsall already had determined in a late-Seventies study that his new approach would be cheaper than light rail.

“You’ve really got to look at the total transit system,” says Bonsall. Rail, taken alone, seems to be cheaper, but the bus systems that feed the trolleys are tremendous loss leaders. And rail advocates never count those losses against their railroads.

“With a busway system, you can tailor the actual supply of buses much more closely to demand,” says Bonsall. But that’s not the only savings. Because buses run the entire length of the city, when they reach the end of the line they can start another route more quickly. So buses and drivers spend less time idling. Bonsall’s original study predicted an operating savings of 22 percent, a figure Bonsall says his bus system is exceeding.

Another plus: small segments of busway can be built around pockets of congestion, meaning suburbs are not left waiting years for better service and a city isn’t locked into building its most expensive downtown segments first. And as for those who claim buses don’t spawn development. Ottawa officials say a billion dollars of new development is springing up around the $400 million transitway system.

All of this is not to name Ottawa the transit Utopia. The newspapers chattered about early cost overruns. Ridership never really jumped and. in a disturbing development, has actually dropped recently. Diesel fumes in the stations and on the streets are a familiar complaint.

The two downtown streets that carry all the buses, plus traffic, are a congested mess of cars, people, and coaches during rush hours. It can take as long to get through downtown as it does to get there from the suburbs. Expensive downtown construction was left for last, and now OC Transpo appears ready to give in to a political solution desired by downtown merchants-a bus tunnel that would be every bit as expensive as a rail subway.

Ottawa officials, however, believe the busway record is positive enough to serve as a model for other large cities. “I mean, we’re so excited about it now that we’re not out trying to sell it to anybody else, but we’re saying. ’Come up and see something,’ ” says Andy Haydon, chairman of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carlton. And, in fact, the American Public Transit Association last year gave Ottawa its highest award.

In the immediate aftermath of the DART bond defeat, board member Tom Taylor of Dallas suggested a modified plan that had Ottawa-like transitways feeding suburban riders to a core rail system in Dallas. Taylor was met by a chorus of boos from suburban leaders who object to anybody else getting rail if their towns don’t.

Meanwhile, Dallas Mayor Annette Strauss quickly asserted that a rail line should be started to demonstrate rail’s effectiveness. But nobody paused to ask if bus transitways could do the same job, or a better one, than light rail-particularly in the most expensive per-rider corridors like the one to Carrollton.

Haydon has thought about it: “In Texas, where I guess there’s a tendency to use all that land-and the densities are pretty low-it would appear to me that a very viable option would be a bus system.”