MISERY ARTICULATED
Transpo’s workhorse buses in paralysis all over town
Somewhat overlooked in Thursday’s LRT fiasco, during which the bulk of the train fleet was in the sick bay, was the performance of the buses.
It was miserable. Social media was alive with photographs of OC Transpo’s articulated buses — we have more than 350 — in various states of paralysis.
And because they’re 18 metres long and can pretzel themselves all over the road, it can make a hell of a mess on a major roadway.
As of 8:40 a.m. Thursday, OC reported there were 56 “immobilized buses” of the 709 buses on the road, or about one in 13. There was no breakdown of the kind of buses, but it’s safe to assume a bunch were of the accordion variety, considered the “workhorses” of the system.
“The service will be fragile,” said OC customer systems and planning boss Pat Scrimgeour, at an 11 a.m. media briefing. He wasn’t speaking about buses only, but we get the idea: When it snows a good deal, a bus commuter’s expectations should go out the window.
At about 8:30 a.m. — the Salsa Red VW was in the shop, thanks for asking — I was waiting for the No. 85 going west on Carling Avenue near Highland. Along came an articulated model, nearly empty, and stopping about 20 metres past the stop — so far along I couldn’t board the front door.
“Go to the back, please. The extreme rear of the bus,” the operator said, a little urgently. What about paying the cash fare? “Never mind. The back.”
There sat about six of us, presumably acting as weight on the rear wheels. (Always willing to use the rear, dear OC, to help pull up the rear.) The operator drove valiantly but it was clear the bus was sliding all over the inside lane.
A surprise awaited us at Carlingwood Shopping Centre. Two buses, it looked like a No. 12 and another 85, were jammed against each other, cheek to cheek, metal on metal, not moving.
A passenger who trundled to the rear said she and her travelling companions had just disembarked that bus because it had slid into another with a mild jolt. Nobody hurt, except maybe OC’s pride. Two operators stood around, waiting for a tow and probably a load of paperwork, maybe a reprimand or a medal.
Just after Lincoln Fields, the poor driver again stopped way past the bus stop, where a man in an electric wheelchair was waiting. As he motored his way through the sludge of snow halfway up his tires, he barked “stupid p---k” toward the operator and made his way to the front door, whereupon the bus knelt and the ramp was deployed.
Oh, but we are a winter wonderland, aren’t we! Twitter was jumping with photographs of buses stuck all over town. “Officially given up. Can’t say I didn’t didn’t try! Now to vent out the smell of burning rubber,” wrote Wilson, an OC operator kindly sending along a photo of his stranded bus.
Another tweeted about three buses stuck in a Kanata neighbourhood. Oddly enough, the buses appeared to be stuck on flat stretches of road. At about the same time, a section of Meadowlands Drive looked like a bus parking lot.
Just as a news conference was about to start at OC’s lair on St. Laurent Boulevard, our ever-intrepid reporter Tom Spears sent out a photo of an articulated bus stuck a block away from the transit authority’s HQ. It was protected by an orange caution pyramid, like a tag on a corpse.
None of this is really new. Articulated buses have long had problems negotiating medium amounts of snow, especially the heavy, slick stuff that fell in the last 24 hours. They weigh roughly 42,000 pounds empty, have three axles but only one — the middle one — that actually drives the wheels. So it is easy to imagine how this pushing of front and pulling of back goes awry in conditions of poor traction.
A trip through the files uncovered some astounding failures. After a snowstorm in December 2006, 80 of the buses had to be towed to safety in one day.
A year earlier, six articulated buses were stuck at the intersection of Eddy Street and Taché Boulevard in Hull after 24 cm of snow had fallen. In all that day, 54 buses broke down. In November 1987, 38 of the fleet of 99 accordion buses were stuck in the same storm.
So, taken together, it was a bad day out there, though this was not a colossal storm: the worst of the old system, another low for the new.
It was miserable. Social media was alive with photographs of OC Transpo’s articulated buses ... in various states of paralysis.