LRT: Beggars Can’t Be Choosers: WHOPPER WATCH

“We need to retrain control over our transit system to make sure we are delivering the highest possible level of service to our residents, to our transit users.”

Mayor Mark Sutcliffe on uploading Ottawa’s LRT to the province through Metrolinx

This is a major whopper. When has the city delivered “the highest possible level of service to our residents” on light rail?

Does the mayor think that the city can upload the LRT system to the province and yet retain control?

What dreamworld is the mayor inhabiting. Beggars can’t be choosers.

The municipality has botched the largest local project in Ottawa’s history to the extent that a provincial inquiry had to be held into what happened to the project. The trains have derailed. Six years after the first derailment, the city still doesn’t know or is refusing to tell what the root cause is of the derailments and failures of the train. The city is pouring axles and bearings into a train that breaks them long before they should.

Furthermore at least theoretically, the province picks up the tab on operational costs and could pay for finishing the project and providing much needed extensions of the lines to Kanata and Barrhaven. Those extensions could have been built if the city didn’t break the bank erecting a luxury project so that city staff could win awards that only obscure bureaucrats could care about or appreciate.

Should taxpayers want the city to retain control of this late, unreliable and expensive imitation of a rail transit system? No. The City of Ottawa and OC Transpo have proven over six years that they cannot possibly successfully run this rail fiasco. And yet the city wants to retain control of the operation. If that happens, commuters should run screaming to another jurisdiction to live.

Meanwhile, the city has absolutely botched the cutting of the bus system through New Ways To Bus which seems very much like the Old Ways To Bus with less service. Probably the city will retain control of the buses in this switch to Metrolinx (if it ever happens) which will leave the municipality more than enough jurisdiction to ruin.

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The basis of a good deal is that both sides get a bit of what they want. The car dealer gets the money he or she wants and the buyer gets the car. Everyone is happy.

The city wants the province to pick up the massive tab for light rail, operate it, expand it and fix it yet the city keeps control of the system. What’s in it for the province? Less than nothing. That’s a deal that won’t work. Sutcliffe is dreaming.

Ottawa taxpayers deserve a train that works and serves all the major parts of this community including Barrhaven and Kanata. The city has proven repeatedly over six years that it cannot.

No Ottawa taxpayer should wish control of this system to the city. It has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that it can’t build and run a successful project.

Give the whole thing to Metrolinx and be damn glad that there’s an outside chance that Ottawa might get the transit service it deserves for the enormous amount of money it cost for this ridiculous late project.

Ken Gray

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