People can think what they want about the mayor, but one of the most overlooked, yet unequivocal facts about Ottawa is that the mayor is 1 voice on city council.

The people of Ottawa, dissatisfied with the performance of city government in the last election voted for a mayor who ran on a platform of change…

… and elected essentially the same band of yahoos who had been screwing everything up for the last 20 years.

That sort of hobbled the mayor from the get-go. I can’t say that LO would have done a great job, but it IS fair to say that he realistically didn’t have a chance and continues not to have a chance.

I only hope that Ottawa voters will understand that next time, and put a good dose of electoral Ty-D-Bowl into the council chamber.

I rode OCTranspo to work from when I arrived in 1988 until 1994. Starting in 1994 I could no longer take the bus due to lack of reliability and length of commute – In 1994 I took a job in Stittsville and it wasn’t possible to get form my house to there by OCTranspo. Later, I started consulting and it was actually cheaper to take a taxi in 1995 because the time I saved could be turned into billable time at the customer site, thus making more money than I spent on taxis.

By 1998 I was walkign to work, no bus needed. In 2002 I started working on the quebec side: 22 minutes by car, 150 minutes by bus… guess which I chose.

Now I’m downtown again, but have the reliability problem. I can’t count on the bus coming by my stop reliably enough to depend on it for getting downtown and making meetings etc. I have to drive simply to ensure I can make my work commitments, and that really pisses me off.

So during this strike, I bring a civil servant to work each morning… for the price of having to regiment my hours a bit, I get half my parking paid for. Epic Win for me!