Take Transit Away From A Careless Municipality: QUOTABLE

 

 

“OC Transpo recognizes that the ongoing service disruption is frustrating for our customers and is committed to restoring service as soon as it is safe to do so.”

Renée Amilcar. general manager, transit services department

The operative phrase in this sentence is “… restoring service as soon as it is safe to do so.”

Whether purposely or inadvertently, Amilcar has admitted that the current Confederation Line is not safe.

It is not safe now. It has not been safe in the past. Witness the derailments. Witness the fact that the train was stopped on the cusp of a catastrophic breakdown. You do not halt a city’s main transit line because of a so-called abundance of caution. You do it because those trains are dangerous. That’s not new. These trains have been operated by a city that throws caution to the wind.

Ottawa’s LRT has been unsafe since early days. The City of Ottawa and OC Transpo have known for some time, perhaps as far back as the first derailment or maybe as far as the first day of operation, that these trains are unsafe.

Transpo Dumps Deadline For LRT Service Resumption

Instead of fixing the problem, the municipal government has been throwing axle assemblies at the problem that they know cannot stand the rigours placed upon them by Ottawa’s trains and trying to keep the system going by changing these inadequate assemblies before they break down … knowing they will break down in a very short time.

Finally, OC Transpo’s unusually labour-intensive checking caught a bearing-axle problem that was serious enough to cancel service immediately. Why did OC Transpo stop the trains? Because its officials were frightened of a derailment. They were scared of people being killed or injured. That’s why you shutdown a city’s main transit line, not through an abundance of caution. That ship has sailed. Abundance of caution was a long time ago if there were ever an abundance at all. That these axles would break was inevitable. The city and OC Transpo knew that.

How Ottawa City Hall and OC Transpo could have run these trains when they are unsafe is unconscionable. Two derailments, a very clear report from the Transportation Safety Board and a provincial inquiry that was as damning as Ottawans’ have seen could not get the attention of municipal politicians and bureaucrats. At city hall it was business as usual.

Ottawa needs Ontario Premier Doug Ford and his provincial government to put new leadership in place to handle transit in Ottawa. We need a provincial administrator because our bureaucrats and politicians are not able or can’t be trusted to do the job required. Need an example? Our civic light-rail subcommittee decided to take a vacation in the midst of this turmoil. Oversight is non-existent. The subcommittee is political posturing and not very good political posturing at that.

There is a precedent for such provincial action. The Ontario government dismissed the board of The Ottawa Hospital when Queen’s Park was unsatisfied with its work and appointed an administrator to run that organization. Something similar needs to happen with transit in Ottawa.

Furthermore, the ministry of transportation needs to probe what has happened to this botched file with the purpose of passing on this information to the Ontario Provincial Police. From there the OPP can decide what to do. The report of last November’s provincial inquiry should provide a convenient road map. So too the TSB report.

Our municipal government has done an abysmal job with $2.2 billion of public money spent on light rail.

Ottawa Loses Faith In LRT, Transpo, City

But worse, much worse, is the quote above. It admits this train is not safe. The well-being of Ottawa’s citizens should be foremost in the minds of the residents of city hall. The above tells us, despite many statements by the city to the contrary, that this is not the case.

The municipal government is not up to the task of running transit in this city, that is obvious. What we need from the premier is a provincial administrator to assume responsibility for this file and to discover injustice in this case if there is wrongdoing to be righted.

OC Transpo buses have spilled Ottawans’ blood twice already … north of Barrhaven and at Westboro station.

Do we really need a third tragedy?

Act premier. Act now.

Ken Gray

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