Better LRT Begins At Ballot Box: DOUCET

By Clive Doucet

Ottawa’s LRT is a world class mess.

The province’s own judicial enquiry proved the conception and management of this project has been both incompetent and sketchy. Mayor Jim Watson made solo decisions, hid information from Ottawa City Council and generally ran it like it was a basement hobby, not a public project costing billions.

The western line now runs along  the western parkway instead of along Carling Avenue where people actually live and is now fouling what was a rather lovely linear park. The trains themselves have proven to be ridiculously fragile, jumping the tracks and failing in inclement weather.

What Ottawa needs is not a Metrolinx takeover which has its own problems but a mayor who actually knows something about transit. There hasn’t been one since Bob Chiarelli brought in the first Ottawa LRT line on-time and on-budget back in the early 2000s.

Phase II was signed and sealed with Siemens and would have been five times cheaper, more accessible and served more people. It was crushed when Chiarelli was defeated in 2006 by a high-tech mayor who was sure you could re-set the Chiarelli transit project like a cranky computer app.

There is a difference between reformatting a computer app and reconfiguring the physical infrastructure of billions in city rail hardware. Nonetheless, Larry O’Brien won and the contract with Siemens was abandoned. It cost millions just to leave the contract and started us down the road we’re on now.

These original mistakes have inspired a cascade of further destructive decisions that continue like bad breath from all levels of government. The latest is from the federal government for a new road bridge across the Ottawa River which will create more traffic snarls and chop more Ottawa neighborhoods up. Ottawa doesn’t need another King Edward Avenue truck route. It needs to use the cross river bridges we have now better, starting with a rail link as the original Chiarelli proposal had.

The city’s declining, but extremely costly transit service, is the result of a series of decisions by mayors who pretended to know what they were doing but didn’t. None of them knew anything about transit. Nonetheless all were effective on the hustings.

 A deal to save Ottawa transit with Metrolinx that re-jigs the cost share and diffuses responsibility sounds tempting like a Hail Mary pass at the end of a losing game but it won’t solve anything. Ottawa’s transit problem started in the ballot box and that’s where it will be fixed.

Anyone for mayor?

Clive Doucet is an author and former councillor for Capital ward.

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