Pathetic: Ottawa’s Light-Rail History

Published 05/16/2025 · Updated 05/16/2025

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“The decision to go with rail was widely regarded as the big-city thing to do. Skeptics, including me, questioned the high capital cost, but enthusiasm won the day. The first stage of the LRT was under way.”

Randall Denley, Ottawa Citizen column

Tunnel-vision.

Denley supported breaking a contract for the second light-rail line plan from downtown to Barrhaven because he favoured an unnecessary tunnel downtown.

Denley backed breaking a contract with the world leader in integrated light-rail system, Siemens of Germany (where they have snow and cold weather). Siemens was familiar with the North American market having produced successful systems across the continent. Alstom of France was new to this continent’s market and conditions. The city chose Alstom.

In breaking that contract, the city paid $100 million in penalties and lost work already done on the Barrhaven link. Breaking that contract, meant that light rail would never get to Barrhaven and Kanata, two huge mistakes. And the tunnel is unnecessary for light rail.

The new plan after the broken contract put light-rail (emphasis on “light”) on a dedicated line running those trains at their maximum technical limits. On a dedicated line you can put heavy commuter rail (such as in the Toronto subway system) with rugged machines and high passenger capacity because they don’t have to negotiate surface traffic as light rail was designed to do (but doesn’t do in Ottawa).

Essentially the plan that Denley backed (and in those days the Citizen was financially healthy, had big reach and influentce) put the wrong train with the wrong plan on the wrong line with an unnecessary tunnel on the wrong route and left out the high-tech future of the city in Kanata and rapidly growing Barrhaven. The earlier plan, backed by former mayor Bob Chiarelli, incorporated in original and future expansion Kanata, Orleans and Barrhaven and would have been reliable (Siemens) and finished a number of years ago.

Today we have a high-maintenance tunnel, low ridership for many reasons but included in them is a lack of accessibility by bus, diminished reliability plus changing circumstances such as the pandemic and work-at-home.

But the biggest problem facing light-rail in this community is time. Calgary built one of the most successful LRT projects in the world (without a tunnel) in 1982 … approaching a half-century ago. The world of 1982 is not the world of 2025 and the future of light rail and transit in general is bleak. In that time, aviation went from the Wright brothers to jet planes and rockets.

Work-at-home will be eclipsed by artificial intelligence (The Bulldog uses some rudimentary AI now for technical and production reasons, not content) and robotics will replace manual tasks. Transit doesn’t fit in that scenario.

One of the biggest problems of the future is not moving people but finding things for them to do as technology takes away their jobs. That’s not a great future for transit.

Want an example? You’re reading it. Newspapers used to take hundreds of people to produce. Now The Bulldog editorial and production is done by a handful of people. Much of what you see like the aggregation of articles is done automatically by technology. No labour involved. No fuss, no muss.

Get used to it. What happened to newspapers is what is coming to your job. And through all of this, the City of Ottawa is building a faulty transit system of the past which will be decimated by AI, robotics, self-driving vehicles and technology we simply can’t imagine yet in the future.

And the city, burning through 750 light-rail axles and god knows how many wheel hubs and cartridges, can’t build the transit system others made work a half-century ago.

Pathetic.

Ken Gray

To read Randall Denley’s column on which this post is based, click here.

To read another Bulldog response to the column, click here.