St. Laurent LRT Situation ‘Complete Chaos’
Having been on the train out of Blair yesterday evening and having it stop at St. Laurent with everyone told to get off and take another train to get to anywhere west of there, I can tell you it was complete chaos.
The entire train was emptied onto the same platform where a crowd was waiting to get on the same train and head to Blair. There were very few OC staff on the platform to direct people and, as soon as the doors opened, people heading to Blair rushed to get on the train before the westbound passengers all had a chance to get off. They were lucky nobody was hurt.
They should never have had that number of people on the platform in the first place. Had they added the R1 buses to and from Blair, they could have had only the people travelling west from St Laurent waiting on the train platform. Anyone headed east would have been upstairs on the bus platform. Safer still would have been to run the R1 service past that point such as to and from Hurdman. If they were working in the St. Laurent tunnel, wouldn’t it have been better all round not to have any trains coming and going through that station?
I was travelling after 9:30 and can only imagine what it was like earlier such as when the stores at St Laurent closed at 9. There’s no excuse for having so few staff on the platform – I saw five in total, three of whom were huddled in the middle of the platform talking to each other and, it appeared to me, pointedly not looking at anyone else.
Another contribution to safety would have been to open the fare gates so that people could have waited in the area behind them rather than being crowded onto the platform. This would have reduced the confusion and spread people out. They could also have used that area to separate the people going east from those going west.
It was complete disorganization and didn’t need to be.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
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Once the senior management at WoeC Transpo heard about this problem, at around 7:00 this morning, they were right on it … after getting a coffee.
Voter. As the wise man once said. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Ottawa used to have a transit system that, while not award-winning, was functional; in fact, the transitway was a model that was adapted by transit systems used in cities worldwide, eg. Mississauga, Brisbane. It was a dependable system in which passengers stood shoulder to shoulder in harmony during peak operating hours. Since the introduction of the LRT, OC Transpo has, as you have pointed out, fallen into a state of chaos. And unfortunately, there is no easy or inexpensive way to return to a state of normality.