LRT: Watson’s Ghost Roams City Hall: THE VOTER

The memo about the opening of light rail lines 2 and 4 went to the mayor and councillors to tell them about the upcoming testing process on the Trillium Line.

The said politicians were at a briefing earlier in the day where they were told the same information. So … does OC Transpo general manager Renee Amilcar think they weren’t paying attention at the briefing?

I read through it and continued to be amazed. To achieve a pass on this “final exam” (her term, not mine), they need to have 14 consecutive days of success on various criteria. But don’t you worry if the Trillium Line flubs the test because it looks like one of the third-party adjudicators can decide to pass the line even if he didn’t make the grade. At least, I think that’s what this bit says:

“Should issues arise that impact daily performance, a determination will be made, validated by the Independent Certifier, assigning either a Non-Project-Co Cause (City) or a Project Co Cause (TransitNext), in accordance with the parameters established in the Project Agreement. This may result in a determination that a specific delay event will be removed from the assessment of TransitNext’s daily performance score.”

The way I understand that, a mess-up can be removed from that day’s score if it’s going to impact daily performance results. I think they’re getting Trillium Line ready to follow in the tracks of his big brother, the Confederation Line. Line 1, as we all know, doesn’t have to perform properly (or even at all) as long as OC Transpo is able to put forward an excuse. We know that Confederation Line flubbed his pre-testing big-time but was allowed to move on to the revenue service level regardless.

We know, of course, that the Trillium Line is already famous for standards not needing to be met since that was the case from the get-go with SNC Lavalin. Nothing new here; no lessons learned.

“On-time performance” is being measured at the two ends of the line. It doesn’t matter how early or late the train is at any of the stations along the route as long as they are no more than 30 seconds late leaving each end. That’s certainly an interesting approach to “on-time” service.

I also note that, once again, Amilcar and her team don’t have enough to do with their time and so are going to produce daily reports on the testing to be distributed far and wide and also will make themselves available to the media every weekday to review that day’s performance report. I have heard that one good way to make it difficult for people to follow what’s going on is to flood them with information. Could that be what’s going on here? Doesn’t she have other things to do? Maybe she could use that time more constructively dealing with the many problems she already has on her table.

She says: “The process and standards incorporate industry best practices, recommendations from the Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry report and lessons learned from the opening of Line 1.” I could have sworn that I saw mention of the problems that might have been solved, or at least known of, had Line 1 been tested in the winter. Does she have a different weatherman than I do who is telling her that there will be a substantial stretch of winter weather before the middle of November which seems a good guesstimate of when her testing period should finish?

The memo is, as usual, filled with bafflegab and could easily have been stated in plain English. Again, the time and energy they spend fluffing up these memos to make them hard to comprehend could so much better have been directed to getting the train(s) on the tracks and the buses on the road to serve the people of Ottawa.

The ghost of Jim Watson continues to roam the halls of OC Transpo.

The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.

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