More buses, more blame — an LRT update off-the-rails
Kelly Egan, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: November 6, 2019
The glorious light-rail revolution was sadly exposed as a piece of magical thinking on Wednesday. Now how to salvage the billion-dollar dream?
It is not a smooth, cutting-edge service — as thousands know first-hand; it is not taking loads of buses off the road; it is not saving millions in labour costs; and it has compounded — not fixed — long-standing problems with bus unreliability.
And the city, largely, has chosen to bus-throw the builder, blaming the RTM maintenance consortium for failing to attend to technical glitches that have let down riders since the Oct. 6 launch of the $2.1-billion system.
Piling one apology on another for the rocky start, senior staff indicated they’re hounding Rideau Transit Maintenance for better responses to broken doors, malfunctioning switches and computer systems that refuse to communicate with each other.
“They have failed the city and its residents,” city general manager Steve Kanellakos edgily told transit commissioners. “We have not received the service we paid for.”
RTM is paid about $4 million a month to maintain the 13-station system and the city says it hasn’t paid the consortium a nickel for September or October and is withholding about $64 million in other payments.
OC Transpo general manager John Manconi attempted to illustrate the urgency of the city’s reaction, saying he was days ago on the phone with an RTM executive at 5:30 a.m. to push to get a broken switch fixed. Both he and Kanellakos said they spent part of the weekend laying it on the line for RTM.
“We are not going to pay them,” said Kanellakos.
The transit commission was told, remarkably, that service isn’t actually that bad, with reliability of 96.7 per cent so far, putting it the middle of the pack for North American LRT systems.
It was hardly a persuasive defence for tens of thousands of riders who have put up with sporadic service for a month and dread the start of winter.
Nor were councillors won over. On behalf of constituents, they complained about a feeder bus service that is now worse, stations with slippery floors or long staircases exposed to weather, or platforms that are too small and overcrowded, about the lack of on-board straps or automated fare machines in the wrong place.
And the city’s main response? Small fixes and more buses.
Mayor Jim Watson announced last week that 40 more buses would be added to the fleet but there continued to be confusion about how they would be deployed and whether, in the words of Bay Ward Coun. Theresa Kavanagh, a “hunger games” mentality would sink in to see which wards would get relief.
There is nothing carefully calculated about the number 40, adding to the feeling of a patchwork response. It only represents the number of unused but still licensed buses that OC can throw at the system. And it will do so in an ad-hoc way, plugging holes on crowded routes, especially those departing from Tunney’s and Blair.
It won’t be until January — when a new “booking” period is open with the operators union — that longterm changes can be made to routes that are overcrowded, frequently late or just ill-designed.
Rather than taking hundreds of buses off the road, the city is dedicating $7.5 million to new buses in 2020 — the 40 old ones and 19 new ones.
Nor have the staff savings materialized. Rather than the 400 to 500 predicted layoffs, the ATU reports that not a single person has lost their job at OC, which is going on a recruitment drive.
This is the very curious part of this LRT launch. OC Transpo is learning to be a train company, but it has always been a bus provider. So how, commissioners asked over and over, could it design a series of bus routes that are so unreliable?
Of the 139 routes OC operates, 100 were affected by the arrival of the train on Oct. 6. So the changes have been massive, the biggest in the system’s history, and the handshake between bus and LRT station is still a wobbly one.
If the train is operating poorly, explained Manconi, it ripples right through the bus service. (When it all works, as it did one day this week, bus reliability rose to 99.5 per cent, he said.)
Still, there is strong suspicion about whether the city did its diligence. Several councillors wondered about the 12 days of continuous, full-service testing that was supposed to be the blue-ribbon test this summer.
Staff offered a number of answers that, honestly, made no sense. It wasn’t 12 continuous days and it appears that all 15 trains weren’t operating during morning and evening peaks. So, was it really a final exam?
Magical thinking? Here’s perhaps one last piece. The city is predicting a 2.6-per-cent ridership bump in 2020.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email
[email protected]
Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/egan-more-buses-more-blame-an-lrt-update-off-the-rails
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