Light-Rail Breakdown Has Huge Extra Costs: THE VOTER

Published 08/05/2023 · Updated 08/05/2023

The Voter looks some of the unaccountable costs of this breakdown of Ottawa’s light rail:

There are the almost uncountable costs.

What would OC Transpo general manager Renee Amilcar be doing with her time if she wasn’t spending it dealing with the LRT fiasco?

I am tempted to question whether there may be a built-in allowance in her mandate and work schedule to allow her to put out fires of this nature. Would that be too cynical of me, I wonder?

Just preparing for and holding media briefings is a very time-intensive venture let alone the meetings with staff, councillors, contractors, etc. and, of course, somehow fitting in the work she is supposed to be doing to run the transit company. Have they perhaps provided her with extra support staff to handle the load or are her existing staff putting in extra hours and how would that be captured?

The same applies to the rest of the OC Transpo and city employees whose efforts are diverted to work that shouldn’t be necessary. While covering this story is part of the media’s job, one can’t help but wonder what other stories are getting short shrift as the train takes centre stage.

While you might get the amount of direct overtime paid to employees whose jobs are identifiable as serving the LRT debacle, there’s no reliable way to measure the extra time salaried employees are spending or knowing what they are not doing because their time is spent on LRT-related issues. If, for example, Sam is working overtime on the R1 bus route, that’s easily included. But what about Harry who’s putting in overtime hours on his regular route to cover for the drivers like Sam who’ve been pulled to drive the R1 buses?

Long and the short of it is I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get an accurate picture of what this is costing the transit company or the city. You might succeed in getting some figures released but it will just be the tip of the iceberg. And it will never reflect the costs to residents who should have been able to rely on the LRT to be past its growing-pains stage by now. People who’ve been docked wages for being late, paid extra day-care fees for late pick-ups, missed doctor’s and other essential appointments, had to forgo social occasions and generally had their lives messed up by this catastrophe will probably not be considered when the costs are counted.

People are paying double-fares because their transfers expire before they get to their last connecting bus. Some are arriving at their transfer point just in time to see their other bus leave and have to wait half an hour for the next and pay another $3.75 to get all the way to their destination. That takes the cost of a round trip to $15 which is not sustainable.

How do we account for the effect of the exhaustion of people spending an extra hour or more each way to get anywhere? Or the isolation of people who don’t go out because it’s a crapshoot whether you’ll make it there and back? The community is paying dearly financially and in many other ways which will never be measured or compensated.