Raise the Hammer

To pay for those Capital costs we had to increase our operating fees including cancelling the planned discount for transit passes for people with low incomes past 2035. Last year

According to the MTO we have the most expensive to maintain roads in the province. In the winter we can get 45-50 cm a day of snow. Just like you come spring time we get pot holes. Mainly having to build the same amount of roads a city of, well 1.2 million, generally has to build but with a geology that greatly increases cost. If you look around Ottawa you see large outcropping of rocks along highways and anywhere significant digging had to occur.

The interesting thing is although, the rock may require very hard drills and dynamite to clear away when you are building a road or Transitway through it. The rain, can by erosion easily break away huge pieces of these rock outcrops and leave them for us to pick them up off the road. Large visible rock outcrops in the 3 story Western Transitway trench that took 2 years of diamond drills and dynamite to cut away, has had to have kilometres of concrete to cover them now because rain and snow are breaking up the faces of these rocks sending huge pieces on to the road surface of the Transitway. You don't have to dig very far here and hit solid rock, in many places he have less than 6 metres of top soil, which means when we build anything, there is a lot of expensive blasting and drilling.

The semi regular 5.3-5.5 earthquakes (roughly one every 2 or 3 years or so) in our seismically active area are enough to do only minor damage to plaster and drywall but it definitely speeds up the degradation of our built infrastructure. In fact before they covered it up with concrete, you could clearly see the major fault lines in some the rock outcroppings along the wall of the western Transitway trench. Were actually do for one now!