Ottawa Does Nothing At Deadly Level-Crossing: QUOTABLE

Published 09/18/2023 · Updated 09/18/2023

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“I just don’t see a reason why it’s taken 10 years and nothing’s been done. I find that unacceptable.”
Clint Crabtree, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 279

A decade has passed since six people were killed and many more injured on an OC Transpo bus that crashed into the side of a Via Rail train north of Barrhaven.

Has anything changed at that level crossing? Not appreciably.

How many people live south of that Via Rail line? Only 103,000 people or slightly less than the population of Kingston.

Ottawa City Hall Weaponizes Secrecy: BENN

And yet a decade after that brutal crash, the city has done basically nothing. Why?

Because the $6.4-billion light-rail project is sucking any extra money out of the city capital project.

The city wanted an “award-winning” LRT so that senior staffers could win prizes at taxpayers’ expense. And you wonder where your tax money goes. Vanity projects.

The Transitway was constructed so it could be upgraded in a jiffy to light rail when ridership warranted. The old stations are serviceable if not pretty. Most Ottawans would have been fine with serviceable before the LRT fiasco. Now they would beg for it. Instead, Ottawa has architectural edifices of stations built at great expense on a line that couldn’t win a booby prize.

And then there is the $700-million tunnel. Houston runs its light rail on Main Street. It calls Main Street Main Street because it is the main street of the city. But Ottawa needs a tunnel to cross its pixy-sized downtown (worth noting: light rail is low-capacity transit meant to run on streets, medians and road shoulders. Dedicated right-of-ways should be used for heavy high-capacity trains. Ottawa has a dedicated right-of-way. Ottawa planners didn’t have the faintest idea what they were doing).

That money could have been used to build to build an overpass at the dangerous Woodroffe Avenue crossing. Those level-crossings exist because Ottawa planners wanted to win awards.

Why Won’t Sutcliffe Sweep City Hall Clean? THE VOTER

The next time OC Transpo and the city tell Ottawans that safety is their first priority, don’t believe them. City hall is absolutely dysfunctional.

Their first priority is self-interest and winning awards with your tax money … even when it comes to safety.

And if the six dead people from the OC Transpo crash a decade ago could talk today, they would tell you the same thing.

Ken Gray

Animation shows the last moments of the fatal 2013 OC Transpo bus crash