Shut Down Light Rail Before People Are Killed

The safety of light rail, or the lack of it, in Ottawa just got worse.

Hard to believe, but the Confederation Line is more dangerous than it was when the train periodically derailed.

But some background first.

Around the time The Bulldog wrote the post Ottawa’s Dangerous Light-Rail Line Must Close, the City of Ottawa and Rideau Transit Group were singing Kumbaya My Lord and hired a bunch of new maintenance people so that derailments and stoppages would end.

Well the love-in by the city and its building and repair company didn’t last long.

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One of the most respected safety organizations in the world, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board, said the Confederation Line was unsafe. Worse than that, the experts at the TSB were not exactly sure what was causing the problems with wheel hub assemblies that precipitated the derailments.

It looked like it was a number of basic structural elements, one of which or a number of which, were putting stress on the wheel hubs. The hubs themselves were built correctly. But the basic design of the train was wrong. That’s what was causing the hubs to fail. Or in other words as Bob Chiarelli, a former mayor and pioneer of light rail in this city, said here in The Bulldog, the train was a “lemon.” Chiarelli was dead on correct.

The city responded to the damning TSB report by saying the board agreed with the municipality that the train was safe. No it didn’t. It’s a pretty sad day when the public has the facts right in front of them that the train was unsafe, but then the city lied twice. One, it said the train was safe. Two, it said the TSB agreed with the city that the train was safe.

A train does not become safe because the city says falsely that it is. Things don’t work that way. If the train is so safe, why is the city fixing it? Doesn’t make sense.

Then all this becomes worse.

The city and RTG are relying on ridiculously often on safety checks to ensure the wheels won’t fall off or derail or both.

The scenario when The Bulldog first said the train should close was that the city was throwing manpower and checking in a labour-intensive way at the train because it was unsafe (the TSB said the resources devoted to train safety were terribly expensive). The reason the city was doing that was because the hub assemblies were not safe due to pressures from a poorly designed train.

That left the train wide open to human error. The city had a situation where the wheel hubs and their cartridges were breaking so they had to be checked extremely often. What the city essentially had was a train in apprehended collapse being propped up by hideous amounts of labour.

But here is the rub. Now an independent consultant has added that slovenliness in repairing the trains has appeared. So we have trains that don’t work, we have the possibility of human error (both of these things we already knew) but now add to that deadly mix slovenliness. We’re cruising for another derailment. Possibly a deadly one. And if people can see this outside the city, no doubt the municipality knows of this situation but continues to run the unsafe trains. Perhaps the city politicians and senior staffers can’t afford to say this train has failed and take it off the tracks. Politics, you know.

Well it is unsafe. Period. Stop. End of story. Unsafe. Get it?

So here is the tale of tape by an independent consultant hired by the city.

Rideau Transit Maintenance (a subset of RTG) was evaluated on 10 important criteria. The company was found compliant on three elements of the study, almost compliant on one, and partially compliant on six. Grammarians and linguists can perhaps help on this but aren’t things either compliant or not compliant? Isn’t compliant an absolute. You either are or you aren’t? There’s no mushy middle.

So this is how this all falls. You’ve got a train that needs constant maintenance because it doesn’t work well, or sometimes, at all. You’ve thrown people at great cost to do the rigorous maintenance that’s required on a faulty train. That opens you wide open to human error. People doing constant maintenance on a train that doesn’t work, even the best of them will make mistakes … it’s the human condition.

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But add to all of this is slovenliness. That’s unconscionable but real. If RTM can’t clean up its act after the provincial LRT inquiry damned the city in one of the most scathing reports in modern Ottawa history, what’s it take to get these folks moving? Dead people?

So RTM was unable to produce some maintenance records for the consultant. Its oversight plan was late. Even some employees doing inspections had not completed their training.

Bad train, human error and sloth. That almost guarantees a major accident.

City officials must close down this line until it can be made safe … if it can be made safe at all.

You know you can always get more money for projects and the people to build them. But what you can’t replace are human lives lost in a crash.

It looks as though a major mishap is only a matter of time.

The city must act now or Ottawans will be killed on those trains.

Ken Gray

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