OC Transpo In Death Spiral: PATTON
Hey buddy. Can you spare an extra $8.6 billion?
OCTranspo Death Spiral Continues
Mike Patton is the former communications director for Mayor Larry O’Brien and the president of the Ottawa West-Nepean PC Association.
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Outrage Or Fairy Tale? The $8.6-Billion Transit Hole
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
Herein the problem lies. The vocal elements of society that demand everyone change their lifestyles to mimic far away cities, cities that bear little resemblance to Ottawa in climate, history or culture, didn’t do their arithmetic.
Change does not start with arithmetic. But one of the consequences of change manifests itself in the arithmetic. The cost, starting in the short term and going on forever (the longest word in the English language) of change is huge. This $8.6 billion shortfall is but the tip of the iceberg that those who demand fundamental changes to society have chosen to ignore. They might recall the events of just over a century ago when the crew of the Titantic didn’t pay sufficient attention to that iceberg. Unless that recollection gets in the way of their enjoyment of the non-computer fantasy game they are playing.
My councillor Cathy Curry said this week that The New Way to Bus will only be implemented once both the two new LRT systems are online. Both of these lines could be game changers as it reduces the time on the bus for most of the people on Ottawa and gets them to work much quicker. The problem is that they hook into Line 1 which went down again both ways this morning. In the two week repair period, the 2 broken escalators at Parliament were not fixed and the smelly stations were not deep cleaned. People are hopeful and are usually willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but the city isn’t even trying to improve and to win people back. It’s a job where they will generally stay employed so it doesn’t matter how you treat the customer. I’m not saying this about the employees, most OC Transpo employees have been great. But the management must be terrible to not look at what was wrong before the shutdown and fix it. More and more I think the shutdown was to accommodate the Quebec contractor to take some vacation during Quebec construction week. There is not a lot of other explanations for why the system was not 100% after the shutdown