Ottawa’s LRT Failure: It’s Time To Start Over
Something I learned back in my economics classes might help city council and the management of OC Transpo. It’s called “cost-benefit analysis.”
It looks at the benefits are of pursuing a particular path and what the costs, both long- and short-term, are of taking or not taking that path. It’s a method of determining whether a chosen course of action is the right one given the variables.
Any sensible person would look at the O-Train fiasco and wonder whether the solution is to toss the current machinery and go back to the drawing board. This will probably be the ultimate outcome – the question is not if but when. It is obviously unpalatable in the extreme for our current crew of politicians to admit that the system is so faulty that the solution is to start again. That will, no doubt, cause major problems for them. It will be costly and disruptive.
LRT In State Of Apprehended Derailment: GRAY
However not doing it will be more costly and disruptive and will unnecessarily stretch the agony over a long period of time. At the end of that period, they will still be faced with the inevitable and have to shut down and replace the system or parts of it.
In the meantime, how much good money are they throwing after bad by continuing to stand by a train that doesn’t work and will likely never work? What is it costing to repetitively replace parts that aren’t defective? What is it costing to inspect and re-inspect the same machines ad infinitum to look for problems that are not there but elsewhere?
What are the benefits of continuing down this path? Well, it seems that if you’re a politician, you can keep doing what you’re doing with no political consequences.
The electorate are happy to ensure your job security every four years, in some cases with more than 50 per cent of the votes cast and even some landslides. If you’re a city bureaucrat, with the exception of those who removed themselves such as former transit head John Manconi, you are still there with no apparent negative consequences for the mess. Bonuses continue to be paid although for what is unknown. If you’re the consortium with the 30-year contract to continue to deliver this fiasco, you’ve had the city sue you and threaten to tear up your contract only to have them settle out of court for some secret deal that kept you in place and released the funds the city was holding back.
The deal certainly didn’t include any provision requiring consistent reliable service.
The damning report from the provincial inquiry had no visible negative impact on any of the many people and organizations it named as contributing to the O-Train catastrophe. Some may have had a night or two of uncomfortable sleep out of it but I’m sure they rest easy now understanding nothing will come of it. Basically, it’s business as usual for these people.
What about the city’s residents – the ones who are footing the bill? Well, it’s business as usual for us too except that there are no benefits accruing to us. We still get expensive and unreliable service and pay, pay, pay, financially and in other ways, with no solution in sight.
Transpo Pulls Buses From Regular Routes For R1
Ontario Premier Doug Ford said that there will be no funds for Stage 3 until Stage 1 is working and Stage 2 is completed. Although that’s a good start, he needs to go a lot further than that. He needs to put a firm stop to the patchwork approach to fixing the system and has to call together the city and the federal government, the other funding party, to determine what a permanent fix would look like, a realistic timetable, what it would cost and how it can be paid for. Then he needs to ensure it gets done and done quickly.
We’ll be paying for this boondoggle for years to come. Let’s make sure we’re paying for a long-term fix, not an endless series of band-aids.
The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.
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In the meantime the contractors continue to build more of the same train sets. The initial Confederation Line had 34 train cars. By the time Stage 2 is operational there are supposed to be 72. Per a recent report, there are 45 train cars in the Belfast Road maintenance yard. Talk about pouring good money after bad.
Ron,
The sad part about that is that, if OC Transpo has to go back to the drawing board as many people believe is the only solution, some of those cars may never see a minute of passenger service but may go straight to the scrapheap. It would be prudent to stop building cars that one assumes are exact copies of the lemons we already have until the “root cause” of the problems can be identified. If the problems are fixable, it makes no sense to continue to build a faulty product the old way. If they aren’t, it makes even less sense to build something that’s headed for the scrapheap. Why not press ‘Pause’ now until you can proceed with confidence?
Normally, when OC Transpo changes its fleet, the old buses are sold to other transit systems. There’s no transit system in the world that would take these trains off OC Transpo’s hands even if they were free. That’s why I’m suggesting that their ultimate destination is the scrap heap. We might recover a bit from their scrap metal value. There may be a few recoverable parts such as the seats but, given the bus company’s track record, they will probably follow the old red Transitway Station shelters to the trash. The word ‘recycle’ isn’t in the OC Transpo dictionary.
Watson once said something like we aren’t buying a Cadillac since we can only afford a Chevy. Unfortunately the city didn’t even get that and we are all paying for that false economy now.
The train was designed for Ottawa, essentially a beta test model. It seemed to run reasonably well when the number of passengers limited during the work from home era. Now with more passengers it is facing catastrophic bearing failures. Bearings have load limits and perhaps a loaded train exceeds those beta design limits. Replacing them as they fail is unsafe, but when did safety really matter when the bottom line counts more and the budget already has a growing $300K hole in it.