What happens when LRT trains return to service Monday?
The question still remains whether Ottawa public transit can ever recapture the faith of riders.
Joanne Laucius, Ottawa Citizen
Published Jul 27, 2023
Sally Thomas typically uses a combination of OC Transpo and Para Transpo. Ever since the Confederation Line LRT was shut down on July 17, however, she has used only Para Transpo to avoid the crowded conditions on city buses.
“When the LRT shuts down, buses are packed,” she said. “I’m a small person in a wheelchair. People want to get home, and they shove in front of me and get on the bus.”
Pretty soon, the bus gets too full before she can get ever on board. “The bus driver just gives me a funny look and drives away.”
With yet another LRT shutdown causing a ripple effect throughout Ottawa’s entire transit ecosystem, Thomas had no choice but to use Para Transpo, something she tries to avoid when possible.
“Para Transpo is already a mess,” said Thomas, who belongs to ParaParity, a group seeking equity for people who use the shared-ride service open to people with a disability.
If all goes according to plan, she’ll be back on the bus Monday when Ottawa’s LRT system returns with limited service, hopefully alleviating some of the bus overcrowding.
Eight single-car trains will run every seven to eight minutes from Blair Station to Tunney’s Pasture Station on a normal schedule. Typically, it’s 11 double trains. The R1 replacement bus service, with 36 buses running during peak hours, will continue to operate.
With the single-car trains and the parallel bus service, the city can provide the capacity required to meet current customer volumes, said Troy Charter, the City of Ottawa’s director of transit service delivery and rail operations.
But transit users will have to make a choice of whether they will take the rail line or the bus service, he said. “That’s why we’re running both services in parallel: to give customers the option.”
As much as that might be PR spin amid yet another embarrassing LRT debacle, the return of any trains is good news for Thomas, even if it’s still unclear how much pressure will be taken off ordinary bus routes. “Every little bit helps,” she said.
The reason for the reduction in the number of trains is a complicated one. A new inspection regime required to get the trains running again means axles will have to be replaced every 60,000 kilometres, not every 175,000 kilometres, as it was before.
“We will be carefully managing our supply of vehicles to ensure there are enough ready to operate while also meeting the more frequent wheel assembly replacement requirements,” said Renée Amilcar, the city’s general manager of transit services.
“Once we can be assured that there is a sustainable number of vehicles for daily operation, we will assess the possibility of increasing the number of trains in service.”
That means transit calculus is being tallied all over the city.
Laura Shantz lives on Vanier and works downtown. She has a dentist appointment on Monday afternoon, which means she will have an important choice to make. Will she take the LRT or will she get on her bicycle, as she has been doing recently to avoid overcrowded buses?
“The great thing is that I won’t have to travel during rush hour,” said Shantz, who is a board member at Ottawa Transit Riders, a transit advocacy organization. “I’m lucky I have a choice.”
Part of that Monday transit math equation is the number of people who can be moved by the available trains during rush hour. Every light rail vehicle has a capacity of about 300 people. Typically, two coupled trains can carry 600 passengers.
“The system was designed to be operated as either single or double trains. Actually, the service plan called for single trains on weekends and in the late evenings. They just stuck with double trains at all times in the end,” said Shane Séguin, editor of Rail Fans Canada, a community of enthusiasts who track Canada’s public transit rail systems.
Séguin believes it’s a good move to get the service opened back up and take some load off the bus service.
“It might be congested at the busiest points of the peak periods but it will still move much more per single vehicle than buses can accommodate right now,” he said.
“Had they waited until they had enough to run double trains, it would be a longer wait or they would have less on the line at any time. For example, they seem to be proposing an eight-minute frequency. So if they used double trains and only had the same amount of vehicles available, it could go to every 12 or 15 minutes.”
He would rather see half the capacity per train but twice the frequency, instead of high capacity and half the frequency by running four double trains, even if it means more crowding during rush hour.
“People coming from the east to downtown ride for around 18 to 20 minutes at most. And from Tunney’s Pasture in the west, it’s 10 minutes. So it will still provide a quicker ride than the buses ever could.”
The question still remains, however, whether Ottawa public transit can ever recapture the faith of riders. Last month, only weeks before the most recent LRT shutdown, the city’s transit commission heard that ridership is about a quarter of pre-pandemic levels, and O-Train ridership is at 43 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.
“I know a lot of people who now bike or walk everywhere, or who have purchased a vehicle,” said Shantz. “Once people have made that switch, it will be hard to go back.”
Her guess is it will take at least a year of good service for people to believe they can rely on the service. That’s a tall ask considering the service can barely get through a season in recent without a major incident.
Lynda Muckleston was a big fan of the LRT. She has a brain injury, which has left her with balance and dizziness issues and a fear of falling in crowded situations.
The past few weeks have shaken Muckleston’s faith in the system. The weekend before the recent LRT shutdown, she was on a train that stopped for 15 minutes. And with the replacement buses earlier in use this week, she was on her way to a doctor’s appointment when the bus broke down.
“From an accessibility point of view, the LRT is amazing. But unless time shows that it’s running reliably, I won’t use it,” she said.
Muckleston has cancelled plans to go to an afternoon movie with a friend. She’s looking for a job, but without reliable public transit, will only apply to jobs that allow her to work from home. After the pandemic, the transit situation has been isolating and she fears it won’t get any better.
“The impact is on those of us who already have to struggle through the day.”
It’s hard to imagine how it could have been much worse. But Kari Glynes Elliott, one of the founders of Ottawa Transit Riders, points out this all occurred in the summertime.
She’s recently been on buses crammed so full that the driver would sail past waiting riders at bus stops. And yet, she points out, in mere weeks students will return to school and workers will come back from vacation, with many of them looking at transit to get around the city.
“They have a short time to figure out what they’re going to do.”
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/what-happens-when-lrt-trains-return-to-service-monday
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