How Developer Cash Broke Ottawa Transit (And Why Clive Doucet Was Right All Along)
Ask yourself a simple question: Who is public transit actually built for in Ottawa?
Is it built for the nurse pulling a 12-hour shift at the Civic Hospital? Is it for the family living in an apartment tower on Carling Avenue trying to get groceries? Or is it a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer subsidy designed to turn cheap, empty land into goldmines for real estate speculators?
Because if you look at how this city has been run for the last twenty years, the answer is painfully clear.
The Carling Avenue That Could Have Been
Back when Ottawa was drawing up its light-rail blueprints, former councillor Clive Doucet yelled from the rooftops about the most obvious, common-sense place to put trains: Carling Avenue.
Think about Carling for a second. It’s a massive, 6-to-8 lane arterial road running straight through established, high-density neighborhoods. It directly links:
- Hundreds of existing residential high-rises from Westboro to Lincoln Fields
- Major employment centers and health hubs, including the Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus
- Three major shopping centers and neighborhood business districts
Doucet proposed running a surface-level, median Light Rail Transit (LRT) system right down the middle of Carling—the kind of simple, efficient street-level rail you see in cities like Calgary, Melbourne, or across Europe. It would have taken cars off a congested street, served hundreds of thousands of residents on day one, and built transit where people already live, work, and shop.
So what did City Hall do instead? They buried trains in trenches and bypassed Carling altogether to hug the Parkway and low-density corridors.
Following the Money: Transit as a Developer Subsidy
City planners told us the Parkway alignment was all about "commuter speed" and "existing rights-of-way." But let’s cut through the spin.
When you run a light rail line down an established street like Carling, the land is already built out. It’s harder to buy up massive parcels of property on the cheap. But when you push a train line through unbuilt corridors, former industrial lands, or edge-of-town greenfields, you immediately gift billions of dollars in land-value increases to the property developers holding those plots.
Being next to a brand-new transit station turns a cheap piece of dirt into a multi-million-dollar condo high-rise.
This isn't an accident; it’s a business model. For decades, Ottawa’s growth strategy has been driven by developer influence:
- Outside the Greenbelt: Approving endless suburban sprawl on wetlands and farmland, forcing taxpayers to pay for ever-expanding roads and infrastructure.
- Inside the Greenbelt: Handing over public assets—from Lansdowne Park to green spaces—for private development, while treating existing communities like an afterthought.
City Hall chose to spend billions building trains for future developments that didn't exist yet, rather than serving the actual taxpayers whose dollars paid for the tracks.
The Price We Pay Today
The result of this developer-first planning isn't just an abstract political debate—we live with the consequences every single day:
- Transit Deserts: Densely populated corridors like Carling were left stranded with unreliable bus service on clogged streets.
- A Fragile Mega-Project: Instead of a modular, street-level network that could be built incrementally, we got a hyper-engineered, deeply flawed transit system plagued by derailments, station smell issues, and constant shutdowns.
- Ignored Neighborhoods: Community association plans and resident voices are routinely overruled the moment a developer shows up with a high-rise proposal and a team of lobbyists.
"Clive Doucet was right: you can't build a livable city when the people who profit from sprawl are the ones holding the drafting pen."
Time for a Community-First Ottawa
If we want an Ottawa that actually works, we need to flip the priority list. Transit should exist to move human beings, not to inflate the portfolios of real estate firms.
We need streetcars and bus rapid transit on major corridors like Carling, Bank, and Innes. We need to protect our remaining public spaces, listen to neighborhood development plans, and stop treating urban planning like a private deal closed behind municipal committee doors.
It’s time to stop building Ottawa for developers—and start building it for the people who actually live here.
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