CITY TALKED A GOOD GAME ON NEW LRT, BUT NOW …
I was contemplating scribbling a humorous guide to riding the LRT — welcome aboard Ottawa, our doors are always open! — except for one little thing.
It isn’t funny — $2.1 billion later, in the first full week, people are walking downtown from stalled trains, or leaping over fences, or feeling trapped in stations instead of transported in tunnels.
This is screwed up, royally so. (Things were so bad on Wednesday that Mayor Jim Watson nearly said “a real swear word.”)
If this were a new car, honestly, we’d be throwing the keys at the dealer and asking for a refund.
There were, literally, thousands of people inconvenienced this week and we’re lucky nothing tragic happened in all this herding of confused crowds up and down, hither and yon. What awaits in the depths of January?
If only to put on paper what everyone is saying: the doors on the new trains open and close 80,000 times a day, the only real “interface” between people and the interior of the vehicle. Passengers are wonderful, except when they’re not. From experience, we know the doors will be pushed, kicked, leaned on, jammed, pried, scratched, probably barfed and pissed on, the full range of human weirdness.
(Indeed, a newsroom wit wondered this week: wait till Bluesfest when the train is loaded with liquored louts.)
People who make trains know this about passengers. And Alstom has been building trains for 90 years. So, to paraphrase the mayor, why can’t they design and build a damn door that is robust enough to withstand exactly what it knows will happen?
Even if it isn’t a design flaw and is, in fact, an operational problem, it all leads to the same question: why wasn’t OC Transpo ready for this?
It has been fiddling and testing the $10-million trains for two years, give or take. Was there never a day when it tried to intentionally jam or pry the doors, then fix them?
Alstom, for Pete’s sake, has 36,000 employees in 60 countries. Where did all that experience get us?
One wants to feel sorry for Transpo boss John Manconi, except this is not humanly possible. At a briefing after Wednesday’s fiasco, he did look like a man delivering a eulogy — something sure has died — while trying to explain how a complicated piece of hardware fails.
“Our goal is to have no door issues,” he said, reading from notes at OC headquarters, “but that is not a reality and I will never sit before you and say this will not happen again.”
Not the most reassuring message, but the only one he’s left with. To be fair to OC, they are taking a series of immediate steps to ensure that one failed door does not a) knock the train out of service and b) knock the entire system on its fanny. The most obvious Plan B is one they’re pursuing — lock the malfunctioning door and keep the train in service with 13 of 14 doors operating.
Much of it is on us, apparently, for the places we put our grubby paws. This is weird, since polite Ottawa never met a rule it didn’t want to follow. Manconi went further, asking passengers not to even run for the train, which I thought was a bit rich. We’ll be running for trains as long as people are in a hurry, which is every day.
Someone asked why all these door issues did not crop up in the three weeks of soft-launching before the system went full-on live Oct. 6, without all the parallel bus backup.
The answer is probably in the numbers. The system works fine when loads are light to moderate but begins to develop cracks when operating at its maximum, with full platforms, full trains and a stressed populace on deadline — for work or a midterm exam. This raises another question: did we properly test the system, for long enough and at full volume, before letting real passengers on?
So now what?
There was talk, even, of bringing back crosstown buses like the 95, to take some pressure off the train and have a ready backup. A desperation move, surely. Now that we’ve ripped the bandage off, there’s no going back. We’re stuck with these trains and we’ve committed to lots more of them in Stage 2.
The fundamental issue is right in front of us, really: OC Transpo, for all its talking a good game all these years, had never run a full LRT system before Oct. 6.
It’s learning as it goes, just like the rest of us. A bus is not a train. Case closed.
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ postmedia.com