Let’s Be Honest About Light Rail: THE VOTER
Long-time Bulldog reader and commenter The Voter wants some good sense and honesty in dealing with light rail:
Here’s the city’s … “We don’t know (or at least aren’t telling YOU) what the root cause of the perpetual problems are but, if we fix the axles, maybe you’ll all look over there giving us some time to pursue the real cause. Meanwhile let’s get that train back on track.” That’s the approach to transit manipulation – errr, I mean, transit management.
Most transit users would rather see the LRT shut down entirely for six months or a year or whatever it takes to identify and fix this problem and any others we aren’t being told about. In the meantime, a carefully planned and well-organized bus system could be put into play that actually provides a similar level of service to what the O-Train was supposed to deliver.
Replacement Buses To Run At Same Time As Light Rail
If you need to rebuild the rails or modify other aspects of the infrastructure, that could all be accomplished at the same time meaning that we aren’t facing shutdowns every few months to patch up yet another problem.
Of course, this would require some openness, transparency and, dare I say it, honesty on the part of the involved parties. That’s not happening anytime soon unfortunately. For anything of this sort to take place, the people who use and who pay for transit in this city would have to matter. And they don’t.
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Just wondering…. Are we sure “a carefully planned and well-organized bus system could be put into play that actually provides a similar level of service to what the O-Train was supposed to deliver”? Have we made such changes that reverting to a bus-based transit system is no longer viable?
Brocklebank, your question resonates with me. One of the problems in trying to revert to an old strategy is that some of the actions taken in implementing change are, if not irreversible, difficult to reinstate.
One of the big savings that the city touted back when a functioning LRT was still a believable piece of hyperbole was that there would be significant savings as the number of bus drivers and the size of the rubber meets the road fleet would decline due to the higher capacity LRT service.
The workforce and the aging fleet were “optimized” (because cut back is so non-empathetic) a few years back. Now that we need more buses and drivers, both are in short supply. During my daily walk-abouts, one of the most common messages I see on the front of OC Transpo buses is “We’re Hiring”.
Maybe if “a well-organized bus system could have been put into play” a few years ago, the LRT pie-in-the-sky fiasco could have been avoided and saved the taxpayers a coupla billion smackeroos. By the way, I guess we know who’s going to get stuck paying to fix up with the little train system that can’t.
I don’t know if it’s too late to do this but maybe it’s possible to reduce the future impact of LRT problems in the extensions to the existing line. Maybe they should be putting in roadways parallel to the tracks so that when the train is not working, there’s a ready-to-go bus transit setup to provide the same routing. This would be a lot more efficient than the current R1 route which meanders all over the place since there aren’t roadways that copy the train route. (Whether this was intentional or not is up for debate.)
They could call it some imaginative name like, say, ‘the transitway’!
That’s very funny, Voter.
cheers
kgray