Royal motorcade broke Canada Day transit service, OC Transpo boss says
David Reevely, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: July 4, 2017 | Last Updated: July 4, 2017 5:03 PM EDT
An abrupt police decision to use OC Transpo’s main route through downtown for a royal motorcade was responsible for freezing the heart of the transit system on Canada Day, the agency’s general manager John Manconi says.
OC Transpo gave free rides on July 1, hoping that getting an anticipated 450,000 Canada Day revellers into and out of the core would be easier and faster using buses rather than a mix of transit and private cars. The transit system can get about 8,000 people an hour into downtown by bus now, as long as nothing goes wrong. Any crowd that size would strain a system designed for an average daily ridership of about 340,000 — demand that’s usually spread across the city and divided between morning and afternoon rush hours.
“Transit is the best option for travelling to Canada Day festivities downtown and across the city!” the company promised. Which it probably was, for anyone outside walking or biking distance.
But early on, would-be riders at the park-and-rides where the city urged the downtown-bound to stash their cars just waited.
Riders closer to downtown stood on platforms watching buses go by without stopping, full of people who’d boarded farther out.
By early afternoon, OC Transpo warned publicly that buses downtown were up to an hour behind schedule. People trying to get into or out of the core sat in unmoving buses, unsure when they’d get going again.
The demand was unprecedented and OC Transpo did its best, Manconi said outside a meeting of city council’s finance committee on Tuesday. What it couldn’t handle, nobody could have, he said: a sudden decision by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to use Albert Street, the irreplaceable westbound bus corridor through downtown, to get Prince Charles and his wife Camilla off Parliament Hill after they joined the celebration there.
OC Transpo’s planners didn’t know that was even a possibility, Manconi said.
“There’s a secret protocol on who picks the routes. There’s three routes chosen and somebody in the RCMP makes that call (on which one to use),” Manconi said. “We quickly responded and adjusted… We don’t know the routes. That’s made by the RCMP.”
(The Mounties didn’t answer a request to respond to Manconi’s account of what happened and how.)
This is the theme of the city’s response to complaints that it was overmatched by the celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday: The people organizing the big show on Parliament Hill did too many things that took Ottawa’s city services by surprise. Much of the trouble can be traced to the hours-long lines to get through the extra security checks to get onto the Hill, which snaked off Wellington Street and got in the way of city-run services like transit.
“It was pretty clear there was a lot of confusion with both the lineups, the time it was taking, and in some cases there were people lining up and it wasn’t even a line,” Mayor Jim Watson said in a separate scrum. “I didn’t see one single sign saying ‘Line up here’ or ‘This line to Parliament Hill’.”
Combine the barely-moving security lines with the surprise motorcade and the system took a blow it couldn’t recover from for hours.
The Transitway shutdown for the motorcade lasted nearly an hour, Manconi said. Since Albert Street had also been closed to regular traffic, pedestrians spilled out onto it — that was a problem all day but was particularly bad when the street didn’t seem to be being used for anything else. Just getting Albert back for buses once the royal motorcade was gone took a flying wedge of Ottawa police, gently pushing people out of the way.
“The buses were making it to the core but because of some of the unprecedented security checks and things like that, we started to lose the corridors and that caused the delays and the buses obviously had a trickle-down effect and then they can’t get over back to the suburban areas,” Manconi said. “We did a bunch of adjustments, we redeployed some buses, got the larger-capacity ones doing more trips in the core and then the 40-footers out to some of the suburban routes that were less dependent on that.”
A suspicious package downtown required more detours to keep buses away from it. “Three major detours, all going back to back, in a day with record-level crowds and so forth. So there were a lot of things that were driving the delays. It’s not about OC Transpo not having a plan and not about OC Transpo not trying to meet expectations,” Manconi said.
OC Transpo doesn’t know how many people it moved on Canada Day but it did do 5,000 bus runs, which Manconi said was a record. In all, he said, even knowing what he knows now, there’s absolutely nothing he’d have done differently in planning for Canada Day. He rode buses that day along with tens of thousands of other people and most of them were pretty satisfied.
Watson acknowledged the complaints but echoed Manconi’s explanations — especially about the vulnerability of Slater and Albert streets.
“It does shine the light on why LRT will change these challenges in the future,” he said. When the light-rail line opens under Queen Street in a year, it won’t be vulnerable to the same problems and will be able to carry three times as many people. “We only have so much capacity. Would it have made sense to bring some buses halfway in empty, so you have some capacity to pick those people up? That might be something we look at in the future.”
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